Word: three
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Time enough, in 15 years, for three new generations and a dozen new audiences. The Who has outpaced them all. Time enough for a bewilderment of pop styles to flare, settle, burn out. The Who has outlasted them all. Too much time for most rock bands to survive. The Who, in every sense of the word, has outlived them all, and outclassed them...
Whether witting or withdrawn, like savings, from some secret zinc-lined stockpile, the honesty of the performance and of the music was armor piercing. "The Who sound came from us playing as a three-piece band and trying to sound like more," Entwistle told TIME's Janice Castro. "I play standard bass, but I combine it with long runs where I take over the lead while Pete bashes out chords." Townshends guitar style?a sort of flywheel progression from rhythmic chords to melody and back again, all performed with whirling arms, splits, slides and high jumps?attracted as much attention...
...also brought the members of The Who a flash of stateside fame they had not previously known. Before Tommy they had been notorious; now they were celebrities. Also in 1969, The Who appeared at Woodstock. "It was all very lovely," Entwistle remembers. "People shacking up in tents sunk three feet in the mud, no toilets, peace and love. Backstage I had a couple of cups of fruit juice and found out someone had put acid in it. I wanted to kill him." Onstage The Who sliced through the flower power like a chain saw in a daisy garden, played with...
...When Drummer Keith Moon was alive, he was 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...
...arrogant at the outset," Jones reports. "We'd start playing one of their songs, and they'd be shocked I didn't know it. But why should I know Who songs? I had my own band." After a decade and a half spent playing and warring together, the three senior Who members may be like brothers, but with undercurrents of the Karamazovs and an overlay of the Dalton boys. It is not only a matter of maintaining a punishingly high musical standard; The Who has the weight of its own myth and the burden of its own history to support...