Who think piece from The New Statesman

["Brian Cady" <cadyb@home.com>]

I just ran across this piece from The New Statesman. It's from their Oct.
30th, 2000 issue but I thought it good enough to dredge up. See what you
think:

Knock knock. (The Who)
by Richard Cook

The Who seem to have been with us for ever, but in fact their official
lifespan was from 1964 to 1983. The subsequent reformations have been
sporadic and enigmatic. While other bands have reunited under a recidivistic
blend of nostalgia and cashing-in, The Who -- whose members have long since
gentrified themselves to the point where financial imperatives are largely
irrelevant -- are a peculiar example of rock's unwillingness to let go. When
Peter Townshend wrote the incomparable manifesto of "My Generation" in 1965,
he could hardly have thought that it would come back to mock him, literally
decades later. Yet Townshend and his gang of middle-aged mods now seem to
have come a remarkable full circle. As pop itself has become fat and
moneyed, these sour old men have retained at least a sliver of real,
hard-won hurt.

They are a last link with the days when mainstream pop still had some
authentic bile. It is important to remember that The Who were an immensely
popular group which, in the midst of that success, still retained an element
of comparatively unaffected outrage, a sting that eluded their grandest
contemporaries, The Beatles and The Rolling Stones. Townshend's writing had
an authentic nastiness about it, to go along with the Sixties kitchen-sink
philosophising. Neither Jagger and Richards nor Lennon and McCartney would
have come up with anything as tough as Townshend' s chilling "Substitute", a
parable of disenfranchisement as volatile as any slug of Sixties "realism"
from the stage or screen. John Lennon might have positioned himself as a
"working-class hero, something to be", but he never dared write anything as
bold as Townshend's "Pictures of Lily", one of the few works of art
concerning masturbation.

It was this almost helpless honesty that made Townshend's work so
compelling, and which sowed the seeds of The Who's destruction. In the end,
Roger Daltrey, who sang most of Townshend's lyrics, found his position as
mouthpiece almost intolerable. When the group released the most hurtful of
all Townshend's song cycles, The Who By Numbers, in 1975, Daltrey all but
admitted that songs such as "However Much I Booze" were figments of an
imagination that he didn't care to own up to.

By that point, the brilliant band of "I Can't Explain" and "Anyway, Anyhow,
Anywhere" had long since matured into an awkwardly grown-up part of rock's
golden age. Townshend eventually revealed himself as a short-story writer
who longed for success in the epic-novel form: hence the livid colours of
those early singles bled into the operatic-rock folly of Tommy and his
magnum opus, Lifehouse, only recently released as an obese and
unsatisfactory multi-disc set of Townshend verbiage. That kind of indulgence
makes it tempting to dismiss him as a dysfunctional relic, but Townshend's
persistence has brought him a crusty dignity. At a show I saw about 18
months ago, Townshend, with a hand-picked band of compatriots, drove though
a set of The Who and other favourites with the bloody-minded fervour of a
man with nothing to prove, but with a great deal of vinegar to dispose of.

His fellow bandsmen have, perhaps, less to offer. Daltrey, his various
careers as actor, TV personality and salmon-farm owner at a somewhat low
ebb, has only boredom to keep at bay; John Entwistle, the eternally faceless
man of the group, can still play the written-in-stone bass solos on "My
Generation" off pat. Kenny Jones joined the band following Keith Moon's
death in 1978, and there is very little to say about him other than that.
The Who has always been Townshend's vehicle, and his pilgrim's progress from
three-minute pop-tune bard to literary eminence is among the more unusual
evolutionary products of the rock cycle. The compensating elegance has been
Townshend's particular self-awareness. He seems to know that he has the
makings of a great writer, but never the wherewithal to turn that gift into
something solid and real, beyond the simple confines of a great pop song.

Simple? There must be few explosions of 20th-century culture as profound and
enduring as Townshend's greatest Who songs. Maybe he was the first of the
rock literati to obsess over the idea that his chosen medium would never be
enough; but the rest of us beg to differ. The leap of faith comes in
insisting that the best of Townshend's work is as powerful and endemic to
its times as that of Mailer and Godard. Not that they had to chum out their
best stuff one more time for stadium audiences. And if you want to know more
. . . oh, I can't explain.

The Who are at London Docklands Arena (0870 512 1212) on 13 November, and at
Wembley Arena (020 8902 0902) on 15 and 16 November

COPYRIGHT 2000 New Statesman, Ltd.

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