Who Cares?

The Who - or what's left of them - are on the farewell tour that was supposed to have taken place 43 years ago.

After Keith Moon died in 1978, the remaining members of the Who, Roger Daltrey (left, above), Pete Townshend (right, above) and John Entwistle decided to move forward with former Faces drummer Kenney Jones replacing Moon and, in addition to a tour in 1979 (the one that included to the infamously fatal stampede at the Riverfront Coliseum that December), the band cut Face Dances in 1981 to meh reviews.  Townshend, recognizing that the Who just didn't sound the same as it had before, when Moon was in the drummer's chair, but not yet realizing that Moon's absence was the sole reason for that, started writing new songs for another album, and a year later, It's Hard was released.  Rolling Stone magazine proclaimed it their best album since Who's Next, but the magazine was alone in that assessment, as even its best, most early-seventies-Who-evocative cuts, "Athena and "Eminence Front," couldn't redeem it.  At that point, Townshend decided that the Who's 1982 tour would be its last, and in 1984, he confirmed that the Who had broken up and wouldn't even be a studio band as had originally been envisioned.

That should have been the end of it, bar one last set at the London Live Aid concert in 1985.  But in 1989, Townshend, Daltrey and Entwistle reunited to tour again (Jones had wisely moved on) and to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the release of their rock opera Tommy, rather than do the simple thing and remaster the original album for a new CD issue.  (Would the three surviving Beatles have toured in 1987 to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of Sgt. Pepper?)  As Jimmy Guterman and Owen O'Donnell later wrote, the remaining members of the Who got a whole ensemble of backup musicians to compensate for Keith Moon's absence, and they didn't even come close.  The Who would tour again throughout the nineties and into the new century, even after the 2002 death of John Entwistle - which occurred in the middle of a Who tour - as well as continuing to perform Tommy on occasion even though the stage musical should have been enough.  (Their current tour coincidentally - noncoincidentally? - intersects with the fiftieth anniversary of the Tommy movie directed by Ken Russell.)  In the forty-odd years since they said they broke up, the Who have recorded only one studio album - 2006's Endless Wire, which got a modicum of attention before Who fans in Whoville returned to listening to Who Are You.  Apart from Endless Wire, and solo albums, the Who have created no new music since their last album as a quartet.

Why is this so upsetting for me, as you can clearly tell by my tone?  Because the Who's refusal to call it a day and step aside until Daltrey and Townshend became octogenarians is indicative of what rock and roll has become since the mid-eighties, which is precisely the time that rap and dance-diva pop began to take over the charts.  The early 1980s found record sales in a depression and many veteran rock and roll acts getting long in the tooth, but a few newer artists still managed to break through and score a few hits, from traditional AOR performers like Billy Squier to spritely pop rockers like Men at Work to the Stray Cats, who seemed poised to bring back rockabilly the way the Rolling Stones brought back the blues.  Heck, the Clash finally broke through on American radio and in the Billboard singles chart.  The Clash opened for the Who on that 1982 tour, and Pete Townshend confided to Joe Strummer that he hoped the Clash would carry the torch that the Who were passing.

For various reasons (*cough cough*, MTV, *cough cough*, Russell Simmons, *cough cough*, radio conglomerates, *cough cough*), the 1980s rock and roll renewal that was supposed to mirror the earlier rock and roll renewal sparked by the British Invasion and the blues revival of the 1960s never happened, as veteran rock acts refused to step aside while younger acts strove to get attention even as rappers and pop divas started sucking up all the oxygen.  Virtually the only signs of life in rock in the 1980s were the success of hair bands and pop-metal acts spewing out recycled riffs and lyrical clichés.  U2, a postpunk band with a jagged sound no one had ever experienced before, were an exception.  Pete Townshend even said that when he heard Dave "The Edge" Evans play guitar, he wanted to give up.

But he didn't.  Rather than make a living editing books or writing avant-garde musicals, Townshend reunited the Who and turned them into an oldies act.

The Who are hardly the only veteran or "legacy" rock band to stick around or come back long after they promised to or should have hit the showers, and for younger rockers striving to get attention beyond college-indie radio play, that is unfortunate, but the Who are easily the worst offenders.  We Who fans never considered them to be as good as the Rolling Stones.  We considered them to be better than the Stones.  Better.  They were better instrumentalists, Roger Daltrey was (and still is) a better singer than Mick Jagger, and they were more innovative and experimental.  And Pete Townshend's and John Entwistle's songs were more imaginative and multifaceted than Jagger's and Keith Richards' songs celebrating pride and joy and greed and sex ("Sha-dooby!"), and even when the Who themselves wrote songs celebrating pride and joy and greed and sex, such as the Entwistle composition "Trick of the Light" from Who Are You, they were more literary about it.  The Who's reunion of its partial lineup for purely nostalgic reasons tarnishes the legacy and the accomplishments of the great band they used to be.

It would have been perfectly fine for Daltrey, Townshend, and Entwistle to continue recording solo albums and eventually fading away as new rockers took their place.  However, their refusal to exit stage left at a time when rock, being overwhelmed by Madonna, rappers, and assorted Jackson family members, was starved for new talent that did not waste their time checking out their jumper-cable hair in the mirror or write tunes making Kiss songs sound like Cole Porter tunes by comparison was one of the reasons rock declined and fell like the Roman Empire.  Note this: When the remainder of the Who's lineup regrouped in 1989, only one rock act - the insufferable Mötley Crüe - managed to have a number-one LP on the Billboard album chart.  A year later, no rock act managed that.

Remember when I said that Townshend in 1982 expected the Clash to carry the torch of rock and roll going forward?  In 1985, the same year the Who did what was supposed to be a one-shot reunion for Live Aid, the Clash, having fired Mick Jones, released a new album with two new members, Cut the Crap, and the title was so descriptive of the crap they had cut that the Clash broke up immediately thereafter.  And who is opening for the Who on this final tour?  The Joe Perry Project.  Led by the same Joe Perry who played guitar for Aerosmith for the previous fifty years.  Hardly a vote of confidence in rock and roll's future.  

Ladies and gentlemen, the two old blokes you see on the stage today are not the Who.  The Who as you originally knew them died forty years ago.  Leave them to rest in peace.  The two old blokes on stage now are a couple of music hall performers who occasionally put on a skit about a deaf, dumb and blind kid who sure plays the mean pinball.  Compare that to Illinois indie rocker Stace England and his concept band Screen Syndicate, who performed their song cycle about B-movie actress Roberta Collins once - in 2014 - and didn't even reproduce it for disc in the studio until 2022.

Now that's rock and roll.