KenCen ‘08: The Who

Theirs was not a symbiotic, John-and-Paul, Mick-and-Keith kind of creative relationship.

Yet Pete Townshend and Roger Daltrey complemented each other in ways absent which the Who could not have been the Who.

For starters, in the early days, Mr. Daltrey was the go-getter of the group; he functioned quite literally as the brawn of the operation. The rest of the Who - or the Detours, as they initially were called in a similar incarnation, and then the High Numbers, then the Who, then briefly the High Numbers again - apparently were a bunch of lazy sods.

“You’ve got to remember that, left to his own devices, Pete would have laid in bed all day when he was at art college,” Mr. Daltrey recalled in an interview included in Andy Neill and Matt Kent’s “Anyway Anyhow Anywhere: The Complete Chronicle of the Who - 1958-1978.”

“I’d set the gear up because it was unbelievable in those days - you could barely get them to carry one amplifier out,” he went on. “We had no roadies; it was me.”

Let’s not even mention how the guys later would treat said equipment onstage: smashing it to bits in the name of theater. (Though it must be said, carrying out the gear in a dustpan makes for an easy load-out.)

The Who is, of course, justly celebrated for what it created rather than what it destroyed.

Peter Crowder, co-director of “Amazing Journey: The Story of the Who” and himself a musician, points out that the Who’s signature album, 1968’s “Tommy,” was the culmination of a new art form - the album. “It was the quintessential LP,” he says.

“It’s such a unique piece,” he continues. “It was the first album that you had to play beginning to end to understand.”

On the tail end of the British Invasion, the Who is often said to occupy a place in the rock pantheon just below - or perhaps just to the side of - the Beatles and the Rolling Stones.

Eric Olsen, editor of the online magazine Blogcritics.org, says the “only thing that keeps the band from peerage with the rock royalty of the Beatles and Stones is their inability to penetrate the core of the culture to a similar degree: Their celebrity never really transcended the music.”

Nevertheless, Mr. Olsen insists, the Who “encompassed rock in its most potent forms” - from “timeless and charmingly skewed mod power-pop singles” like “My Generation” and “I Can’t Explain” to the “meticulous long-form rock narratives” of “Tommy” and “Quadrophenia” and “quintessential classic rock” LPs such as “Live at Leeds” and “Who’s Next.”

Not unimportantly, the Who was - and remains to this day - a galvanizing live act that fills arenas.

The band’s genius was not a case, as is often said, of a sum greater than its parts. With the Who, the joins always showed. The band mates were a bundle of contradictions: They were proto-punk rockers who made an opera. Their drummer exploded traditional notions of timekeeping and backbeat. They were four disparate personalities who did not jell so much as coexist in a state of volatile musicality.

The Who was not a smooth-running, well-oiled machine.

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