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Shoreline review from S.F. Chronicle (+pictures!)



Available on line at:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2000/08/23
/DD108960.DTL&type=music

Click on the pictures for larger versions.

Playing for Keeps
The Who returns to form with an urgent, explosive show at Shoreline

Joel Selvin, Chronicle Pop Music Editor    Wednesday, August 23, 2000

Long live the Who.

The sun may long ago have set on the British empire, but not all its glories
have faded.

Returning to action with the swashbuckling verve of musicians half their
age, the three surviving members of the storied British rock band nearly
destroyed a capacity crowd at Shoreline Amphitheatre on Monday with what
bandleader Pete Townshend called ``Who brutalism.'' Comeback tours by aging
rockers tend to be wobbly affairs, with the musicians propped up by
additional players, light shows, set design, anything to distract the
audience from the band's lack of vitality.

Not so the Who, who came out smoking. The inevitable ``I Can't Explain'' and
``Substitute'' led to a crunching ``Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere,'' punctuated
by a cataclysmic Townshend guitar solo complete with trademark windmill arm
swings.

For all of the nearly three-hour, 19-song concert, the musicians did not
just revisit their halcyon years -- they re-created the Who in all its
splendor and magnificence. With drummer Zak Starkey providing explosive
power on drums and longtime associate John ``Rabbit'' Bundrick on keyboards,
the band gave a performance as powerful and exciting as anything the Who has
done on Bay Area stages since the '70s.

It was nothing less than a return to form by one of the greatest rock bands
of all time. Other bands may have sold more records or played bigger
concerts, but no rock band ever mattered more than the Who.

The band's mastermind, Townshend, articulated the deep, dark heart of rock
with his combination of self-doubt, rage, paranoia, frustration and sheer
joy. At age 55, bald as a banker and still string-bean thin, Townshend was
his cranky, peeved, masterful self at Shoreline.

``I was so clever when I was young,'' he told the crowd, strumming the
introduction of ``Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere.'' ``I'm so f-- stupid now.''

By the end of the exhausting evening, after he had slashed out hundreds of
power chords, squeezed off thousands of squealing notes, chirped his harmony
vocals behind the ever-youthful Roger Daltrey and presided over a
performance that ran the gamut from chaos to precision, Townshend's face was
wreathed in smiles. He knew it was good.

One of the key reasons was drummer Starkey, whose father (Ringo Starr)
played drums with the Beatles. Starkey has been traveling in Who circles
since he joined Daltrey's solo tour in 1994. Unlike Kenney Jones, the
personable drummer from the Small Faces who replaced Keith Moon in the early
'80s, Starkey can duplicate Moon's maniacal onslaught, which was an
absolutely essential ingredient to the band's incendiary sound.

Although advertised as the Greatest Hits Tour 2000, the program contained
some eccentricities. It wasn't just the near-exclusion of anything from the
landmark rock opera ``Tommy,'' outside of an incidental performance of
``Pinball Wizard.'' The band also turned some lesser numbers into authentic
epics -- ``I Don't Even Know Myself,'' ``Relay,'' ``Naked Eye,'' ``Let's See
Action.'' Townshend punched out a sublime ``Drowned'' by himself on acoustic
guitar. But the show focused primarily on classic-rock Who -- ``Won't Get
Fooled Again,'' ``Who Are You,'' ``Bargain,'' ``Behind Blue Eyes,'' ``Baba
O'Riley,'' even that latter-era turkey ``You Better You Bet.'' An entire
generation knows the Who only from the 1971 album ``Who's Next,'' a record
that has been played into submission by classic-rock radio, which helps to
explain the relative youth of the upscale audience that paid as much as $150
per ticket.

At least the crowd got to see what all the fuss was about. Who concerts for
the past couple of decades have been largely lackluster, hollow shells of
the towering emotional sieges that people who were there 30 or more years
ago remember as if they were last month. As with last year's acoustic
preview of the full reunion at the annual Bridge concert, the musicians
onstage at Shoreline played for keeps.

That, of course, was the real trademark of the Who. Townshend's guitar was
an instrument he used to wage war. The entire range of human drama -- hope,
anguish, anger, rapture -- was there for all to see. It was never merely a
performance. It was life and death.

Such urgency is hard to keep up, but Monday's concert was more than a
reminder. Somehow these elder statesmen of rock tapped into that same
mystical energy that served them as youths.

Townshend told the crowd that rock during the 1970s was trying to be a new
church -- that's how seriously he took it -- but that ultimately it didn't
prove worthy. ``But we did know how to congregate.''

E-mail Joel Selvin at selvin@sfgate.com.

©2000 San Francisco Chronicle   Page B1

        -Brian in Atlanta
         The Who This Month!
        http://members.home.net/cadyb/who.htm