Who "Time" magazine article

[danabt@ix.netcom.com]

Hi all. I'm a pretty happy person right now because my dear friend from Chicago sent me the issue of "Time" from
1979 which had a great article on The 'Oo that I have long since disposed of because of wear and tear (too many 
thumb tacks). Anyway, I'm sooooo happy about it that I'd like to reprint it (obviously without permission!) for 
those of you who have never read it. For those of you going "ugh, don't waste the space here, I've already read that
bloody article!!!" don't fret, I'll send the article in  7 installments so it will be easier for you to ignore. If
you still feel the need to flame, please do so privately, thanks. 

>From Time magazine, October 17, 1979
"Rocks Outer Limits"
Through turmoil and triumph, The Who make music that will last
by Jay Cocks

Time enough, in 15 years, for three new generations and a dozen new audiences. The Who has outpaced them all. Time
enough for a bewilderment of pop styles to flare, settle, burn out. The Who has outlasted them all. Too much time for
most rock bands to survive. The Who, in every sense of the word, has outlived them all, and outclassed them too.
The Who has sustained--indeed, defined--the vaunting, unstable strength that is the soul of rock, the barefoot boogie 
along the keen edge of the blade. There are lots of scars and some wounds that will never heal. The music remains intact,
inviolate. No other group has ever pushed rock so far, or asked so much from it. No other band has ever matched its sound,
a particular combination of sonic onslaught and melodic delicacy that is like chamber music in the middle of a commando
raid. No other group, in return, has ever had so much asked of it by an audience which takes it as an absolute article of
faith that, every time out, The Who plays for moral stakes.
In performance the band seems to play possessed. The music itself is animated by excess, insists on, and receives, a 
response in kind. Who audiences are some of the most fiercely loyal, and some of the wildest, in rock. Abandon is the aim,
and to reach that The Who acts in concert with the audience; "They bring you alive," as John Entwistle, the bass player,
puts it. The excess they want, groups and fans together, is a release, an explosive culmination of energy, a detonation of
good will and great music. "Rock's always been demanding," says Pete Townshend, who writes most Who songs. "It is demanding 
of its performers, and its audience. And of society. Demanding of change."
Society sometimes does not get the message, and that only seems to push The Who harder. The power and unpredictability of
the group, along with its longstanding and much vaunted intramural volatility (We've been breaking up ever since the days we
started," says vocalist Roger Daltrey), are a large measure of its appeal and, ironically, the core of much of its strength.
It is also the source for a good deal of discomfort and antagonism among those who take rock music casually, and especially
among those who would like never to put up with it all.
Last week, playing a concert date in Cincinnati during the first week of an 18 day blitz of the East and Midwest, The Who
found itself performing after a crowd stampede that killed eleven people. The tragedy took place outside Riverfront Coliseum
as thousands of kids holding unreserved seats charged across a concrete plaza toward two unlocked entrances. The group had 
not yet come onstage. "If it had happened inside," said Townshend, "I would never have played again." The musicians could not
be blamed and, indeed, did not learn what had happened until after the concert. They were shattered, and, for a time,
considered that in some ways they might be responsible. The Who knows as well as its fans that, since the group's beginnings,
it has always lived at the outer limits of rock. That is the dangerous borderland where the best rock music is made, the music 
that lasts and makes a difference. Elvis Presley lived there. So still do Chuck Berry and John Lennon, Van Morrison and Bob
Dylan and Bruce Springsteen. Buddy Holly, Sam cooke and Jimi Hendrix died there. And The Who has taken up permenent residence.
The danger that pervades this territory is not a matter of threat, but a kind of proud, blind, spiritual recklessness, forming
a musical brotherhood that could be bound by the words of Russian poet Andrei Voznesensky: "To live is to burn."
For a long time, back in their early days, the four received a great deal of notoriety for amashing their instruments at the 
end of each performance. It was, at first, a flashy, frightening, and finally exhilarating thing to see. Drummer Keith Moon 
blew up his drum kit, and Townshend rammed the neck of his guitar into his amp, while Daltrey slammed his microphone against
the stage and Entwistle held tight to his bass, playing stubbornly on like a ship's lone survivor trying to keep dry in a 
leaking lifeboat. There wass too much discussion about how this was all rock's reflection of Pop art, happenings and 
autodestruction, how the demolition ws an action crtique of material values. But until the destruction came to be expected and 
then required, all this razing was never phony. Anyone in the audience could tell those instruments were extensions of, even
surrogates for, the four blessed, blitzed maniacs in the band. That was not Pop art onstage; it was a gang war.
There were no seperate peaces. Only nightly shards of instruments lying on the floor of the stage like jigsaw fragments. "We're
always trying to outdo each other onstage," Daltrey says. "All of us are a bit mad. We've stayed together for 15 years because
we've never stopped fighting," adds Townshend, "The Who's like an open book. It leads to a kind of unwitting honesty. That's
what I think the fans really get fanatic about."