Word: rocke
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...replaced on drums by Kenny Jones, 31. The group still puts My Generation across with enough swagger and insinuation to get you giddy or make you feel like you are being stalked down a dark street. When Townshend, 35, called himself "the aging daddy of punk rock," he was not being entirely facetious. Who music can match the tough street impact of punk, especially as Daltrey dishes it out. At 35, he may be one of the oldest kids in the playground, but he is still one of the toughest. Townshend melodies like Pure and Easy, Baba O'Riley...
...subtle. Townshend's obsessions are the audience, music itself and a certain evasive, almost evanescent kind of spirituality that has its roots in the teaching of the Indian mystic Meher Baba, to whom Townshend is devoted. Tommy, which became the most widely known Who work, was a two-record "rock opera" about a deaf, dumb and blind pinball champ who was raised into a kind of pop artifact and rock-'n'-roll godhead. It sold more than 2 million copies, bought the band out of years of accumulated debt from broken instruments, leveled hotel rooms and erratic U.S. touring...
...Woodstock generation. "You've got to remember that Tommy was antidrug in 1969," Daltrey recalls. Townshend, who had been through his own phase with drugs, was not only using Tommy as a mirror for Baba's antidrug strictures but was also putting refractions of Baba's teachings into a rock context. Tommy ended by pulling the rug out from under false idols, directing the search for salvation inward and out toward the audience. What Tommy sang to his disciples, freeing them, was also the Who's address to its audience, both thanks and a supplication: "Listening...
...raise your eye/ It's only teen-age wasteland"; the aching, almost elegant poignancy of The Song Is Over and Pure and Easy. All these songs concerned music and the compact of trust between audience and artist. As compositions they enhanced and extended the possibilities of rock. As Townshend wrote those songs, and The Who performed them, the truth of Townshend's contention became clear: "Rock has no limits." All that, and they can be danced...
...like a self-contained chain reaction, "our little bit of nasty," as Daltrey calls him. Moon died of an overdose of Heminevirin, a drug he was taking to combat his alcoholism. Moon's passing forced a crisis within the group, the three surviving members re-examining their loyalty to rock, and to each other. Daltrey told Townshend: "Keith's life and death were a gift to the group. A sacrifice to allow us to continue." Townshend recalls thinking at the time, "How can I agree with something as 20th Century-Fox as that? But I felt it too. That besides...