Reconsidering The Seventies: The Who

One of the key tenets of being a late-seventies, early eighties musical “rebel” was rejecting not only the bland corporate rock and jet-set superstars of the seventies, but affecting a studied boredom with the sixties.  The Beatles were fun, but they were old news. The Stones had turned into a multinational enterprise more famous for their glam lifestyle than any actual music they’d done since 1972 or so.  Don’t even start talking about the Moody Blues, the Dave Clark Five, Herman’s Hermits, The Hollies, Gerry and the Pacemakers…

But there were two survivors of the British Invasion that still demanded respect.  The Kinks (of whom more later), who were sort of like the garage band we all wanted to have, run by Ray Davies, the same too-clever, too snarky, too-cool-to-be-a-hipster kind of guy we all aspired to be (or better yet, little brother Dave, the guitar anti-hero who spawned many a punk imitator)…

…and The Who.

And while I paid dutiful homage to the Kinks into my twenties (when I really dug into their backlog), The Who were one of my obsessions in high school.

Part of it was that their greatest work – Who’s Next and Quadrophenia, from ’71 and ’74 – seemed to zone in on the angst of being a teenager…

…well, no.  Not a “teenager”, per se.  A pretentious teenager given to trying to think big thoughts and give off big aggression. 

They smashed things. 

They spanned the generations:

(I know – it’s Kenny Jones on drums. Don’t hate).

They stared into the face of the punks, and recognized…themselves!

He looked at the generations who came before and said “I’d rather die before I turn into you!”, and blew things up!

And they not only sang about kids like us – well, in a rhetorical, symbolic sense, anyway – they did it almost by name!

And so well through high school, The Who was what I cranked to 11.  Townsend, all untrammeled angst and windmilling, hand-shredding aggression and smashing guitars and and Hiwatt amps cranked to 15 (not to mention John Entwhistle’s superhuman bass lines and Keith Moon’s improbably anarchic yet precise drumming), was what I aspired to be.  Only cooler. 

And I was probably well into my thirties when I realized – the reason I, the overheated adolescent rebel without a cause or much of a clue liked The Who much was that Pete Townsend, all the way through his thirties, was still an overheated adolescent himself.  Townsend may have been the first pop star in history to have gone straight from adolescence to middle age without an intervening young adult stage. 

And as I outgrew that tortured time of my life – or at least let the energy channel itself elsewhere – I can’t honestly say that I outgrew The Who – but it turned into something different; a look into a time capsule that helps me remember exactly where I was and what I felt like when I was 15 and bashing my head against…

…well, something.  Always something.  Because in my mind, that was the lot of the teenager outsider.  To smash things – guitars, amps, conventions, heads against the wall. 

Just like Pete Townsend.

12 thoughts on “Reconsidering The Seventies: The Who

  1. They played very well. Even with only one guitar they were able, also thanks to the phenomenal Entwistle on bass and Bonham the drummer, to make music that every aspiring kid with a new guitar (but of average ability) could not play. Or even really fake.

    Worse, they made it look so easy, wind milling, smashing those great pieces of equipment, etc. but still didn’t miss a beat. Townsend didn’t really play lead, did he? I think someone in the band did, but I could never really catch them at it. Roger Daltry was fine, too.

    The “live” Tommy from Live at Leeds is phenomenal. So was the rest of that album. Plus, their rendition of Summertime Blues gave those of us with very little talent a little piece of their portfolio that we could sort of play recognizably.

    I could never really classify them as part of the British Invasion.

    If only they’d have passed on that Superbowl gig. Somewhere under that stage there was a great white waiting for a snack …

  2. Completely agree. One of the greatest bands ever. Even through the Kenny Jones era; thought It’s Hard was very underrated. 40 years later they were still stealing the show as evidence by the Concert for New York after 9/11.

  3. Really good essay, Mitch. The Who lost steam toward the end, but through Quadrophenia they were pretty great.

    I’m looking forward to your look at the Kinks. I’ve always had trouble sorting them out.

  4. Thanx, all!

    Joe – the drummer was Keith Moon. Although Moonie and Bonzo had many traits in common.

  5. Saw both, last and THE last WHO shows when I was growing up in TO. Awesome. Speaking of teen angst Mitch, you gonna do a piece on Alice?

  6. Yep.

    Kinks, too – although that’s gonna be a bit, since I’m still chewing on that one.

  7. LEGAL DISCLAIMER: Between the years of 1977 and 1984 I cannot be held responsible for anything I did while listening to The Who.

  8. Mr. Berg … You are right, as usual. My apologies. My musical snobbery sometimes outpaces my musical knowledge. Thanks for the clarification.

  9. Bah, they only had one clever tune: “Dogs, Part 2” and that was a B-side.

  10. The amount of thought you put into stuff in the 70’s is amazing, Mitch. As I recall, the only things of importance to me at the time were the price of ganja and being careful not to swallow the pop top when chugging a can of Bud.

    I’d go see any band that someone had a spare ticket for.

    Angst? Fagettaboutit.

  11. No Boones Farm Apple Wine? The real stuff, not the wine cooler versions they make now. Man, I loved that stuff at a far younger age than I should have.
    97 cents well spent for a flavorful 12% wine. I would kill for a cold, fresh bottle of that now …

  12. I will carry to my grave the memory of their show in Edmonton circa 1978; the dark hall…vague shapes moving on the stage… the synthesizer riff for Baba O’Reilly starting up in complete darkness… and about 16 bars in to it every light in the place coming on to show Townsend a foot off the stage windmilling the opening guitar power chord.

    It took me a good 24 hours to get the ringing out of my ears and the shit eating grin off my face.

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