Word: townshend
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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...
Unfortunately, their new movie, The Kids Are Alright and its soundtrack album don't nearly do justice to the band's legendary performing style. Peter Townshend plays his guitar by rotating his arm like a vertical helicopter blade; Moon grins and leers through drum solos; John Entwistle, like all bass players, stands expressionless. You can see all this in The Kids Are Alright; but you miss the music. For some reason, Jeff Stein--who put the movie together--chose a few very good film sequences and mixed them up, without any sense of order, with a lot of trashy ones...
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...
...Townshend takes a more honest look at his own music in "New Song," which opens...