Word: townshend
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Drummer Kenny Jones hit the downbeat. John Entwistle ran out a bass line as strong as a backbone. Roger Daltrey strutted and sang, and Pete Townshend, leaping, launched them all into Substitute. At that opening moment last week, The Who set new standards, redeemed old promises and put a few ghosts to rest. These concerts may become not only one of the seminal rock events of 1979 but a route dynamited into the new decade...
There were times when The Who, and Townshend in particular, were unable to deliver. Sometimes, too, Townshend even questioned his own willingness to deliver. At times like these-around the release of Who Are You in 1978 and the death that year of Drummer Keith Moon at 32-a certain kind of frantic hopelessness sets in, and the fans respond with a terrible wounded fury, with their own dark suspicions that, as Townshend once wrote, "the song is over...
...storm center. But the unsentimental truth has proved to be that the lessons of geometry do not necessarily apply, and that in rock the whole is sometimes greater than the sum of its parts. The Who endure partly on their own wild momentum, partly on the strength of Townshend's compositions-some of the most brilliant, adventurous and lacerating in all rock-and partly on the indestructibility of the covenant with the fans, who will never let their band off easy...
Stein doesn't try to show us anything more about the Who than what we already know--that its members are quite ugly, that they can play extremely good music, and that they used to smash their instruments. He couldn't resist putting every Townshend guitar-smashing ever recorded on film into his movie...
...albums; it might serve as a good "best of" collection for those who don't. But even in its two-records-for-little-more-than-the-price-of-one format, its chief reason to exist seems to be to make a little more money for the band. Townshend has to keep up his monthly payments to his guru somehow...