Friday, December 5, 2008
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.
It was an atom-smasher.
Sadly, half of the quartet won't see Mr. Daltrey and Mr. Townshend collect their Kennedy Center Honors. Were Keith Moon (sedative overdose, 1978) and John Entwistle (cocaine-triggered heart attack, 2002) still alive, it is hard to imagine any award-granting institution excluding them from an honor related to the music of the Who.
Mr. Moon's maniacal drumming was groundbreaking for its time, as were Mr. Entwistle's immovably virtuosic bass lines. As a pair, they revolutionized the role of a rhythm section; within the confines of the Who, their assertiveness meant that each member of the band served a lead role.
Still, we're left with just two - Mr. Daltrey, 64, the golden-haired, microphone-lassoing, archetypal rock frontman, and Mr. Townshend, 63, the awkward, gangly, cerebral fellow with a big nose.
Back to the matter of complementarity: Mr. Daltrey is credited as a co-writer on just a few songs in the Who catalog, including the band's second single, "Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere."
Yet he was more than a mere mouthpiece for the words and melodies crafted by Mr. Townshend; the latter has called Mr. Daltrey "my best interpreter." Without the force and depth of Mr. Daltrey's voice, Who classics such as "Pinball Wizard," "Behind Blue Eyes" and "Won't Get Fooled Again" would not have soared to the heights they did.
Mr. Townshend's attention to the granular level of his music - note well, guitarists, how he finely differentiates each guitar lick at the end of the verses in "Bargain" - and his patience for experimentation - behold the YouTube clips that reveal how he arpeggiated those organ lines in "Won't Get Fooled Again" and "Baba O'Riley" - are not to be understated.
But every great artist can stand a few happy accidents or lucky contingencies. The Who was no different.
Mr. Townshend attributed the unique chordal structure of hits such as "Substitute" to the days when he couldn't afford guitar strings and thus made do with fewer than six.
The windmill guitar move?
Mr. Townshend thought he was imitating his hero, Keith Richards, whom he once observed making the famous arm motion backstage. He later deduced that the man was simply limbering up.
And the gear destruction?
Mr. Townshend accidentally damaged a guitar during a 1964 gig in the London suburb of Harrow; he finished the job out of frustration. Mr. Moon later smashed his drum kit, deliberately, "to demonstrate solidarity."
Take care of those medals, boys.
The band mates were a bundle of contradictions: They were proto-punk rockers who made an opera. They were four disparate personalities who did not jell so much as coexist in a state of volatile musicality.
Take care of those medals, boys.