Biznono wrote: 3. I think The Kinks' music is more befitting to the contemplative nature of ageing.
I had never thought about the difference between the two bands in quite that way, but I think this probably explains why now, as an older man, I listen to the Kinks more than The Who. Thank you, run joe, run, for making this excellent point.
Brett Eugene Ralph, man of three respectable first names, it was I believe another man of three names, George Bernard Shaw, who once had to apologize to someone when he didn't have time to write a short letter and therefore had to write a long one. Let me too apologize for not having the time to be more concise.
Let me also say that I can accept your hatred of The Who. I have friends who hate them, and they usually point the finger at Daltrey. And admittedly, on paper the Who seems like crap. A pretentious art-school songwriter. A lead singer who never wrote the lyrics he sang. An obsession with rock opera, which, suggests that the band needed to adopt the forms of "high culture" to legitimize what they doing.
But in practice, and maybe in spite of themselves, they were an amazing band. They were and still are impossible to cover -- not a necessary or sufficient precondition for greatness but something which proved how essential each member was to the band. That’s even so for Roger Daltrey, whose "stupidity" neutralized Townshend's pretentiousness.
Their best songs walked the line between stability and chaos. See Live at Leeds or the show they played on the Isle of Wight in 1970, by both of which I do not believe a man from the beautiful state that has given us bourbon could fail to be moved.
They were ambitious, and succeeded as often as they disappointed. To take one example, they were one of the only bands whose use of synthesizers circa 1970 has at no point in the last three decades sounded dated.
No one in the band was a virtuoso in the conventional sense (maybe in Entwistle's case this changed over time), but they nevertheless fundamentally changed the way we think about guitar, bass, and drums. The best evidence for this is the segment on the DVD of the Kids are Alright that shows live performances with line feeds of just the bass, then just the drums, then just the guitar.
Madre del dolor! Life is too short for me to continue trying to list their virtues. Since a man's affection for a band is always as personal as well-reasoned, let me turn to anecdote and say that seeing The Who as a twelve year old boy changed my life. This was in 1982, on the first of their many farewell tours. Kenny Jones, a good drummer chosen for the wrong job, was on drums. Given that even their last record with Keith Moon was awful except for the title-track, their heyday was already a distant memory. They were also playing in the enormously impersonal Astrodome in Houston. Again, something that on paper should be terrible was not. But I always wondered how falsely I was impressed at the age of twelve. So, four years ago when I was in Manchester (England) for a long stretch of time and came across an ad for a Who show at the local enormo-dome, I thought, what the fuck. I should go get proof that you cannot trust your twelve-year-old self.
I don't know if the show in Manchester told me anything about what I remembered. What was partly amazing about it, in fact, were things I would not have picked up on in 1982. In front of me sat a young lesbian couple (or, I should not assume, maybe just two young women who very beautifully showed their affection for one another through various physical gestures); to one side of me sat a man, probably just under fifty, with his teenage son; behind me sat a typical seeming Mancunian family, on the other side of me sat two guys in their mid or late 30s. Maybe these are simply the multitudes who embraced a record like Who's Next. But the crowd around me struck me instead as very telling about The Who's special ability to appeal to social outsiders as well as apparently more traditional and typical sorts of people, to parents as well as their teenagers, who any parent present with kids at this show implicitly must have believed could learn something from the band about youth culture.
Of course the audience, she can only tell you so much. And none of what she tells would have mattered anyway if the band had not been so exciting to see. Daltrey's performance redefined the sixty-year-old rock singer. At one point, during an impromptu version of "Mary-Anne with the Shaky Hands" in what must have been the fourteenth encore, he fell back into the drum set and came back up on his feet laughing and without losing his place in the song. Townshend's guitar playing was remarkably technically proficient. I've heard that he practiced for five hours a day before the touring they did in the late 90s, maybe so his proficiency could be his alibi for the accusation that he was looking at child-porn around the clock. Entwistle, who at the time was not long for this world, looked like he had been exsanguinated before the show, which may be the only explanation for how he was able to fit into his tight, purple leather pants and stiletto sharkskin boots. But he played like the man who invented the bass guitar, for himself, and no one but himself, to play. If there is a God, if there is a Heaven, and if the soul of John Entwistle made it to meet the first and reside in the second -- ah, motherfucker, maybe the third proposition is too implausible in light of his solo record Too Late the Hero... If there is a Devil who controls our lives, John Entwistle, let's say, was already a dead man in the late 1990s. But the Devil, he allows The Ox to play this show in Manchester because Hell is Peavey-powered, the Devil knows once Entwistle is there all bass solos will be on T40 and TNT, the Devil, he wants to hear Entwistle play one last time on Earth rock stage, and the Devil, he tells Entwistle this is it for you, do something special for me and I do something special for you.
This is the bass playing i heard that night. The final sound of a nearly mythical creature. A footnote in the history of Western Civilization, to be sure -- just the Prometheus round-wound. But such a beautiful moment. Such an amazing last sound to be made by a man, dressed like a purple woman.
Any band who can play this well and this playfully, with the prosthetic limb that is Zak Starkey (surprisingly functional though it is), after so many years, and by no means on the level at which they played (from what i can tell from film footage) in their prime; any band who can play this well in so many respects at the bottom of their game is legendary for good reason. You will not be convinced Brett Eugene Ralph. So beautiful that we agree to disagree. But readers of this website, you should know that The Who helped to invent the rock that most of us play. Unlike the Beatles and the Stones, the Who actually do belong in that rare category of bands who were admired by critics and ordinary people and who also happened to have the capacity to be genuinely and singularly great.
Requiescat in pace Thunderfingers!
