Hooray For Me!
A Column by Captain Spaulding

WON'T GET FOOLED AGAIN? WANNA BET?

[Chicago - 6/22/2000] Next week The Who kicks off its 2,373rd farewell tour at the New World Music Theater somewhere out in the suburban wilderness west of Chicago. And with it, another little piece of the band's integrity falls by the wayside. While it may seem oxymoronic to refer to a rock 'n' roll band's "integrity", the irony is that The Who was once one of the few bands around that not only had it, but valued it. More's the pity.

The problem isn't that the band's three surviving members (guitarist/vocalist Pete Townshend, lead vocalist Roger Daltrey, and bassist/vocalist John Entwistle), all of whom are in their mid-fifties, are superannuated. People no longer hold Townshend's "My Generation" manifesto, "Hope I die before I get old", over his head like the sword of Damocles. Rock may be limping into its sixth decade as a recognized genre of popular music, but at least it has now been established that long-in-the-tooth rock musicians can still be inspired on occasion to put out valuable work. It's becoming increasingly obvious that wisdom and experience can be useful tradeoffs to the energy of youth, even in the kinetic atmosphere of rock 'n' roll. As the demographic of rock fans gets older, too, it will become even more imperative that artists who have been around the block a few times be judged on their own merits rather than dismissed out of hand as old farts. With people in their forties and even their fifties still buying music that features electric guitars, and with more and more young people turning to hip-hop rather than rock as their primary cultural idiom, the idea of rock's enduring youth culture is something that's receding more and more in the rearview mirror.

The main problem is that the band keeps reneging on its original vow to call it quits. This is their fourth tour since they originally broke up in the early eighties, and that doesn't include a lot of one-off concerts interspersed between those tours. They haven't toured nearly enough in the eighties and nineties to be considered an intact unit ... but they have done enough moneymaking jaunts to severely damage their credibility.

One could argue that all entertainers, be they musicians or athletes, should have the right to come out of retirement if they so desire. If Frank Sinatra, Michael Jordan, and Muhammed Ali could change their mind and stage comebacks, why shouldn't The Who have the same opportunity? The problem with that is that The Who isn't a working band anymore. Their last studio album, the lackluster It's Hard, was released eighteen years ago. That's an entire lifetime for a lot of rock fans.

This is also what separates them from their former Swinging London role models and latter-day peers, the Rolling Stones. People are also apt to pile on the Stones for embarking on megatours well into the band's decrepitude. But the difference is that the Stones never ceased to be a working band. While Voodoo Lounge and Bridges To Babylon may pale in comparison to their late sixties and early seventies discography, the Stones have always continued the cycle of recording and touring that defines a working band; they've merely slowed down their pace to a millionaire's crawl. Also, they don't operate under the burden of artistic expectations that are any larger than their own desire to make good music. They never have. The Who, thanks to Townshend's thoughful lyrics, album concepts, and rhetorical aspirations, has long demonstrated "faith in something bigger", to quote a Townshend song title, than merely creating more new music for the masses.

Another comparison can be made with Led Zeppelin. The Who lost its drummer and most distinctive musical element, Keith Moon, to a prescription drug overdose in 1978. The surviving trio then made what could be seen even at the time as a misstep by deciding to replace him and carry on as a band. Led Zep, too, suffered the death of its stylistically distinct drummer, two years to the month after Moon's death. But the remaining Zepmen decided to put their band in the grave with John Bonham. They steadfastly refused to cave in for what would have been hugely profitable reunion tours; when Led Zep demigods Robert Plant and Jimmy Page got back together for a pair of albums and tours in the nineties, they eschewed the use of the Zeppelin name ... and of Zeppelin's bassist, John Paul Jones.

Bands that don't record new material fall into one of two categories -- bar bands and oldies bands. Both exist for economic reasons first, aesthetic reasons second. Unless you're in a boy band assembled by some crass huckster in order to make a pile of dough, the reverse order of priorities ostensibly holds true for recording bands. Certainly, a band with as distinguished a recording legacy as The Who is posed with a problem of glaring creative inertia when the trio can't play even one of their songs onstage that isn't already a generation old. The Who isn't essentially different than those dried-up oldies bands like The Temptations, The Buckinghams, and Steppenwolf that slog through the annual county fair circuit. The Who just does it with a bigger budget.

Some stories emanating from The Who camp insist that the band will eventually record an album of new material. Most of that insistence comes from Daltrey, who even says that he's writing songs for the new album (and every Who fan should shudder at that prospect). Townshend, though, shows no indication of putting such a project on his front burner -- and, as the band's leader, nothing happens with The Who unless it has Townshend's blessing and support. At any rate, with the arguable exception of "After the Fire"(a Townshend composition that first appeared on a Daltrey solo album fifteen years ago), there are no new Who songs that are being premiered or promoted on this tour.

Let's be clear on this point -- I don't begrudge oldies acts the right to tour. I've seen some of the Foghats, Go-Gos, and Romantics out there at various fairgrounds, and enjoyed them for reasons of nostalgia if nothing else. There are people in bands like that who tour because they have to; economic necessity dictates that they use whatever skills or personal capital they have in order to make a living, just like everyone else, and playing oldies with their has-been bands is thus their modest meal ticket. And here is where The Who parts company with those acts. The motivation behind this Who reunion tour and its predecessors, to quote Townshend's comment to the Los Angeles Times, is "a long story and not a particularly nice one".

Essentially, the three Whosters are back on the road again for the purpose of keeping Daltrey and Entwistle in the style of living to which they have become accustomed. Townshend sneers at this, wondering out loud why they find it necessary to live in mansions that are "forty times" the size of his London digs. In addition, Entwistle needs to bankroll his solo hobby; his club tours with his own bands have always been money-losing propositions. While they don't have the steady income that Townshend enjoys from songwriting royalties, Daltrey and Entwistle are hardly living hand-to-mouth. This tour is about accruing capital so that those two can stay in the top U.K. tax bracket.

So why is Townshend, who has a million other projects on his plate at the moment (including the massive Lifehouse multimedia project and his latest foray into Internet-oriented short films), putting it all aside to tour with a band that he firmly considers a part of his past? Part of it is loyalty to his mates; never close to them in the band's heyday, the eternally-ruminative Townshend has reassessed his relationships since Moon's death and the guitarist's near-fatal struggle with alcohol and heroin addiction in the early eighties. And part of it is the feeling of responsibility that he has towards the band's fans. Few rock artists have ever agonized over what their music means to the people in the cheap seats as much as has Townshend. While he has self-deprecatingly downplayed the importance of his band's music at times (particularly in light of the obvious damage that these sham reunion tours have done to The Who's reputation), he never ceased to consider what he does as Art with a capital A. And that is in large part because he considers the interplay of musician and fans as a key component of his creative work. If the fans want a tour, he'll talk himself into doing it because the love of Joe Whofan for the band validates what the trio is doing.

Unfortunately, this really isn't the case. Without new music, this interplay is a lovefest and not a creative act. It's no different than what goes on in Vegas or Branson when a Wayne Newton or an Andy Williams takes the stage. There's nothing new in those scripts, and the blue-haired ladies will clap for their heroes anyway just as much as The Who's fans will clap for theirs from the cheap seats of various arenas. In referring to the Lifehouse Chronicles, the six-CD set that forms the heart of his Lifehouse multimedia project, Townshend still spoke of his music in terms of it being "good and true and ambitious and risky". Well, Lifehouse is all of those things -- or at least he is making the attempt to have it be all of those things, because there is a creative investment there in producing something new (even if much of the material is being reassembled from his off-and-on work on Lifehouse since the early seventies). Without new Who material, there is nothing "good and true and ambitious and risky" at all in this tour.

To be fair, The Who actually does have new material out of a sort -- the live CD The Blues to the Bush, for sale only through the Internet. The performances on it aren't bad at all considering the band's rust, but the only real reason to listen to it is to hear how the third successor to Moon's chair, Zak Starkey (Ringo Starr's son) assays the band's material. The Who isn't a free-form improvisatory unit like the Grateful Dead or Phish, where songs are played in a wildly different fashion from one night to the next; and as long as Townshend is playing electric guitar rather than acoustic they won't tinker much with the traditional live arrangement of the songs. You're not likely to hear something that you've never heard before in the umpteenth live version of "Substitute" released by the band.

Townshend did promise some "surprises" on this tour, but there likely won't be anything more than minor tinkering with the greatest-hits set list that they've used since the glaciers receded. As I said, there's no new material to work with, and the band's internal dynamics are such that they will not drop staples such as "My Generation", "Baba O'Riley", and "Who Are You" from the set list in favor of obscurities like "Odorono", "Dogs", and "In a Hand or a Face". Plus, like all latter-day arena shows, the sound and lighting cues will be so tightly scripted (not to mention the backing tapes that they will likely use for certain songs) that the spontaneity that really makes a rock show come alive -- the sort of spontaneity that used to be the hallmark of a Who concert -- will be nil.

Another concern is the health question. Townshend has given up on only playing acoustic guitar in order to salvage what's left of his hearing; he'll be windmilling away on Gibson Les Pauls in his traditional fashion on this tour. Last month he told a chat room audience that his tinnitus is back. Furthermore, Entwistle's hearing is shot as well; the Ox is now wearing hearing aids in both ears. While willful self-destruction has long been a central aspect of the rock star metier (and few did it better than Keith Moon and Pete Townshend), it's a little sad to see it in older men who have come to take the long view of life and who have experienced the senseless loss of a colleague and friend. And it must be sad to be a true fan of the band and to sit there in the fortieth row realizing that your heroes are further hurting themselves by the very act of playing their music.

I fully expect to have Who fans -- as zealous a bunch as there are in rock 'n' roll -- torch me with flame e-mails in response to this column. Since it should now be glaringly obvious to the reader that I, too, am a long-time fan of the band, I suppose that these e-mails will take on the flavor of true believers calling out a traitor. No matter. I only ask that Who loyalists write more literate and thoughtful nasty notes than the ones that I received from Jimmy Buffett and George Michael fans after I took their idols to task in this column. Ticket-buying dupes or not, I expect nothing less from Townshend disciples.

For all of his myriad and well-publicized faults, there's still a basic nobility to Pete Townshend. He recently revealed that he had ceased work on his autobiography because he is so aware of his shortcomings in terms of keeping things straight (many observers, including band biographer Dave Marsh, have gone on at length about Townshend's prevaricating) that he feels the need to consult with people from his past in order to tell the true story of his life. Now that's character. And, as I said, loyalty to his bandmates and his fans are what's bringing him out on the road yet again. But there are important aspects of his life that Towser takes too lightly here ... and one of them is his band's good name.

CAPTAIN SPAULDING

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