THE WHO IN AMERICA

THE WHO IN AMERICA TALKING 'BOUT THEIR GENERATION

TOBY GOLDSTEIN

The Who were never about being "nice boys." That wasn't their purpose, and they succeeded admirably. The Who are not the only original British Invasion group to have survived up to almost the present day; if their latest breakup is indeed the Final Fini, they are outlived by the Rolling Stones, Kinks, even reunited Animals and Hollies. However, the Who were unique in being unrelentingly angry, mad, pissed off and f-f-f-frustrated from humble beginnings to stratospheric conclusion. When the Sex Pistols burst forth from a dingy cellar in 1976 screaming "No Future!" they were grafting a modern translation of futility onto a message four other working class men had blurted out 1 2 years earlier: "Why don't you all f-f-fade away...." Indeed.

Ironically, like the Sex Pistols after them, when the Who first emerged on the London club scene, their message was far more suited to the U.K.'s repressed emotions than to America's relative complacency. Further, when the Pistols' time came upon us, U.S. youth first rejected it, preferring the by-nowpredictable arena rock flash of megastars like—the Who. Oh, how Pete Townshend must have felt every one of his over-30 years upon that sad realization! And how he must have recalled with fondness the struggle which the Who were given in America—a battle for a piece of the early Brit-rock action which turned into a threeyear war. Almost alone of the original English rock bands, the Who glumly watched as hit after Top U.K. hit sunk into the American concrete of oblivion. So what if their image at home was perhaps the most sharply defined of all pop groups? In America, Mods and Rockers were meaningless references, not opposing teenage self-definitions. After all, hadn't one of the Beatles responded, when asked if he was a Mod or a Rocker, "I'm a mocker"?

The Who were far from universal at the onset. They were of, by and for the fringe element, the obsessive young Mod man (rarely girl) who defined himself with closets of perfectly cut suits and imported Levi's Sta-Prest slacks, topped by a parka; who rode motor scooters festooned with banks of mirrors on every available square inch, and fueled their dancin' fool love of rhythm'n'blues/ primeval soul music with a variety of amphetamines. This—essence of Mod—was the environment which surrounded the still-teenage Who in 1963, and became a natural home for them in England.

Pete Townshend, Roger Daltrey and John Entwistle had known one another from their rough-edged West London neighborhood of Shepherd's Bush. When their first primitive band, the Detours, evolved into the appropriately Modsounding High Numbers in 1963, an exsurf band drummer named Keith Moon soon completed their lineup. Befitting their polarized attitude on behalf of the Mods was the High Numbers' only release,

"I'm The Face" (every Mod aspired to be a Face—the instantly known and widely respected leader of a particular pack).

When two former film directors, Kit Lambert and Chris Stamp, became the group's next managers (a position they held until Bill Curbishly took over in 1970), their name was changed to the Who—an ultimate symbol of equal parts identification and confusion—and the band's Mod appeal became total. One big highlight of o Mod's repertoire was his frustration and aggression, ably assisted by all the pills he took. Feeling angry—but in need of their boring office jobs to keep themselves in clothes, scooters and drugs—Mods released energy by maniacal dancing, and by seasonal fights with Rocker gangs (the leather-jacketed Rockers tended to have construction-type jobsand worship '50s rock 'n' roll). The Who easily satisfied their largely London following by combining r'n'b cover versions with their own howling originals: "I Can't Explain,” "Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere,” "My Generation” (an instant anthem for both Mods and even non-Mod but angry teens) and the BBC-banned "Substitute.” All were British Top 10 hits. None meant diddly in the U.S., which all through 1965 clutched the Beatles, Rolling Stones, Animals, Kinks, even Herman's Hermits, fer gosh sake, to its money machine.

Occasionally, the teenage fan magazines here did run photos of the Who in their immaculately Face-like outfits, adding the intriguing comment that these "boys” caused riots at home by smashing their equipment at the end of each show. What in God's name was that all about, we fans fearfully wondered, as American musicians, already coated with disdain for the Limey usurpers, breathed fury at anyone who would defile their hard-earned tools of the trade. As it happened, the smashing, like the super-Mod stance, began with a natural inclination, then was frozen into a posture.

Early in Keith Moon's association with the Who, the intense little drummer hit his kit so hard that he smashed through a couple of drum skins, impressing the hell out of the other band members. Soon afterward, the Who were playing one of their many regional London club residences when Pete Townshend gave a characteristic leap, and wedged his guitar neck into the low-hanging ceiling. Carried away by the moment,

Townshend 86'd that guitar into bits by pounding it against the stage, and Moon and Daltrey joined in by totalling some drums and a microphone. Great gimmick, thought management, but quite expensive if done regularly. Before long, except on special occasions, Townshend deftly switched his good guitar for a pre-rigged breakaway model at the expected tumultuous conclusion of "My Generation.” While Townshend praised anarchy and youthful rebellion—including his own—to a salivating press, and the Who were frequently banned from playing live in England (shades of punk to come!), the band's American debut proved to be as routinized as one could imagine.

Shortly after a single called "Happy Jack”—a melodic, almost sweet departure from their early r'n'b flavored, hard-edged releases—reached the U.S. Top 40 in 1967, the Who gave their American premiere performances with a Murray the "K" package show in New York. These extravaganzas—long a part of rock n' roll history—lumped a diverse bunch of performers into a seemingly never-ending show. Each artist played three or four songs, five to six times each day. Naturally, Townshend's breakaway guitar got round-the-clock airings during that week-long event. (Don't feel too shabby about this—it was how Cream debuted here, too.)

Quite different, however, was the Who's electrifying show at the Monterey Pop Festival in June, the performance which thrust the band into America's consciousness. Within a year, they would go from cult object status to being a very, very big deal, as would another unknown at the festival, Jimi Hendrix. Flower-power era audiences may have dearly loved preaching peace and tranquility, but they gave a thunderous response to the Who's message of destruction, both at Monterey and on subsequent tour dates. What a show! For most, far from being the frightening mayhem their elders fretted over, the Who represented rock's total liberating power. As important early rock writer Nik Cohn pointed out back in 1969 (in his Rock From The Beginning; Stein & Day, NYC), "In America, their image has been rather different. They haven't been seen so much as experimenters,they've gone down more as a classic hard rock band, almost as throwbacks...they are the most basic group on the circuit." It is a comment which holds as much validity today as it did 15 years ago.

During the next two years, the Who slowly built up their American following. The Who Sell Out, a marvelously clever album which imitated a pirate radio station, complete with adverts and jingles, didn't sell monumentally here, but its single of "I Can See For Miles" certainly did. The 1968 "Magic Bus" also did well. By 1969, when they played at the mammoth Woodstock Festival, both the Who and their colleague-in-outrage, Jimi Hendrix, were far better known to young Americans than they had been at that other festival just two short years earlier. The Who found it easy to sell out such critical rock palaces as the Fillmore East—where Pete Townshend and Roger Daltrey were arrested when they assaulted a cop trying to stop their set; ihere was o fire blazing next door and the theater had to be evacuated. They were tagged with the brush of notoriety when the Doors caused a riot opening for the Who at Flushing, New York's Singer Bowl. Even if Jimbo's wang-grabbing caused the wild audience rush toward the stage, because the Who were headliners (they never even played) some of the press fury spilled onto them.

Pete Townshend crossed the line into genius/excess (depends on your point of view) when his two-record opus, Tommy, was released in 1969. Though it remains (besides "My Generation") the best known Who music of the band's large catalog, Tommy was performed complete exactly twice, once in London and then, in 1970, at New York's Metropolitan Opera House, to a well-behaved, selfcontained group of concertgoers. No guitars were smashed or drums shattered those nights, Townshend's triumph of inspiration over perspiration. Bits and pieces of Tommy immediately were added to the Who's live show, which left no doubts that audiences were moving thick into the midst of arena-rock. The inconcert album follow-up to Tommy, Live at Leeds, was a far more accurate reflection of what the Who offered to rock fans—noise, extravaganza, and once-every-night outrage.

An odd situation soon developed: the Who's popularity as superstar, 20-minutesolos, stadium rockers often eclipsed sales and attention paid to their studio recordings. Slowly, various band members began releasing solo work when the Who weren't on one of their yearly American coast-to-coast sweeps. It was no big secret that the members of the group often fought among themselves, particularly Townshend and Daltrey, and that Keith Moon was frequently an unreliable space cadet—albeit a fiendishly good drummer. Yet the Who's 1973, 1974 and 1975 stadium tours drew more attention to the band than Pete Townshend's harshly autobiographical Quadrophenia or the somewhat boring Who By Numbers, which yielded one of the band's lesser hits, ''Squeeze Box." A film version of Tommy, starring Roger Daltrey and directed to typical superfluity by Ken Russell, was flocked to by rabid Who fans, but not many others. That did mark the start of a recurring acting career for Daltrey—one which has finally brought him critical praise this year, when he mastered Shakespeare on PBS.

America was happily complacent as the 1970s plodded along, but not England, where punk dominated sales, if not the often-censored charts, by 1 977. The band who claimed, "Hope I die before I get old," were getting old. Townshend, to his everlasting credit, offered an open mind to the punks, especially one Paul Weller, whose Jam was a contemporary version of the Mod-appeal, spitfire era Who.

Unfortunately, one member of the Who, Keith Moon, did die before he got old—in 1978, of a pill overdose. Devastated by mortality as well as age, the Who enlisted an old colleague from the '60s, ex-Small Face (another formative Mod band) Kenney Jones, as Moon's replacement. Coincidentally, the last album Moon had recorded with the Who, Who Are You, was a platinum success in the U.S.

Since the band had been absent from touring for several years, the Who's 1979 American visit was frantically awaited by their fans. Everything progressed without incident until the group's December appearance in Cincinnati, a night which focused the kind of attention on the Who that Townshend could never have imagined in his wildest pyrotechnic nightmares. As a result of "festival seating," the sale of unreserved, general admission tickets, and a severalhour pileup of fans waiting to get in, 1 1 people were killed at the Riverfront Coliseum. At first, the group didn't even know what had occurred; naturally, when the horrific news was told to them, it had to have affected the band's attitude toward the idea of giving these massive events for the rest of their creative lives.

It would be three years before the Who again toured America, and those appearances, in 1 983, were said to be their last. Playing at some of the biggest venues of their career, including New York's Shea Stadium, the Who ended their 16 years in the limelight in typically spectacular fashion. They also may well have been hinting that their particular torch had passed to a new generation of Englishmen, whose anger was now in closer touch with that of young people.

The Clash were chosen to open the Who's Shea Stadium concert.

Something that the Who dreaded had finally happened. They had grown up.