One of the key tenets of being\u00a0a 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.\u00a0 The Beatles were fun, but they were old news.\u00a0The Stones had turned into a multinational enterprise more famous for their glam lifestyle than any actual music they’d done since 1972 or so.\u00a0 Don’t even start talking about the Moody Blues, the Dave Clark Five, Herman’s Hermits, The Hollies, Gerry and the Pacemakers…<\/p>\n
But there were two survivors of the British Invasion that still demanded respect.\u00a0 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)…<\/p>\n
…and The Who.<\/p>\n
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And while I paid dutiful homage<\/em> to the Kinks into my twenties (when I really dug into their backlog), The Who were one of my obsessions in high school.<\/p>\n Part of it was that their greatest work – Who’s Next<\/em> and Quadrophenia, <\/em>from ’71 and ’74 – seemed to zone in on the angst of being a teenager…<\/p>\n …well, no.\u00a0 Not a “teenager”, per se.\u00a0 A pretentious teenager given to trying to think big thoughts and give off big aggression.\u00a0<\/p>\n They smashed things.\u00a0<\/p>\n