Sunday, September 7th 2008

Shows:  The Who

Talkin’ Bout My Favorite Station (And The Who)

By Johnny Firecloud

Flipping through the channels last night, I happened to stumble on something we rarely see nowadays: a real live rock concert.

The Who played a show at the Gaumont State Theater in London on December 15th 1977, 9 days after I was born. It was recorded on 35mm for the Who rockumentary film The Kids Are Alright, and PBS aired the whole thing for the first time- remastered, digitally restored, the works- last night.

I was astonished.

I consider myself a Who fan; I own just about all their records (except the more recent ones), and my favorite band ever is fronted by one of their most celebrated disciples (Eddie Vedder), who pulls from their catalog frequently onstage, giving the unexposed a crash course in Whoology. I’ve even seen ‘em live a couple times, but that was on this side of the millennium- long after the fire, long after Moon checked out, and way after the group’s original venom lost its sweet potency.

The Kilburn show was the band’s first in fourteen months, and it was evident to all that Pete Townshend was on edge. Clearly irritated with the performance, he ended the solo to My Wife by knocking over a bunch of shit, screaming at one of the stagehands and shoving his amp head off the stack- right at the tech. After a flawless, blistering rendition of I’m Free, he said “This wasn’t worth filming, you might as well send the cameraman home.”

This was not the ornery old man in the wilting horrors of today’s reality- that man was still decades away, tucked into some nightmare vision of the future where tabloids define the political landscape and bands declare war on their fans. This man was still every bit the windmilling, vitriolic living legend in his prime, a bell-bottomed mix of boiling fury and effortless swagger. And he wasn’t happy with the performance.

Who biographer Dave Marsh wrote this about the show: “The Kilburn show was a disaster. Moon hadn’t practised ‘in three years’ (in John’s words), and he was a nervous wreck, distraught at having to face a public appearance in such gruesome physical condition. For the first time, there was no way to conceal his weaknesses: They showed in his potbelly and in his playing. The rest of the band was almost as nervous- it had been fourteen months since Toronto. ‘That was the first time I can remember being drunk before a show,’ said Entwistle. Between their ragged playing and the necessity of stopping and starting while camera angles and lenses were changed, the show was such a negative experience that no one could have blamed them if none of the Who ever took a stage again.” (Dave Marsh, Before I Get Old: The Story of The Who, p.494).

If this was the Who at their worst, I’ll never roll my eyes again when I hear the old-timers lament over “the real spirit” and “how things used to be” in rock n’ roll. Because this rusty, nervous and frustrated band kicks the shit out of 95% of the live acts I’ve seen in my entire life.

Before an extra-somber Behind Blue Eyes, a shifty, purple-sequined Keith Moon addressed the audience: “This is about the only song I don’t actually do main vocals on, to give the other guys, you know… a bit of a go. So I’m gonna go backstage and OD, and I’ll be back in about three and a half minutes. I’ll see you then, thanks.” With less than a year to live and only one more show to play before he died, it evokes a strange feeling to watch him joke about overdosing, furthered in no small part by the fact that he was coked off his tits when he climbed back behind the kit. 

During the intro to Baba O’Reilly, you could see the snare slugger in the dark, backlit in red, miming frantic fills over the intro (without actually hitting anything). Whatever people thought of the show, whatever nerves dominated the evening overall, it was clear in that moment that Keith was having a blast. Sadly, it was the second to last show he’d ever play with the band.

A looser, more stompy rendition of their teenage wasteland classic followed, Daltry’s vocals as gleaming as ever. Marching in place with his muscle shirt and painted-on bell bottom jeans, he was cocky personified- defining an element people like David Lee Roth could only caricaturize in the decades to follow. His self-confidence was blinding, but Lord, when he tore into that harmonica solo… Pete’s pogoing and kicking his feet out like a drunk Russian, Moon’s got a shiteating grin on his face, and the crowd’s going absolutely apeshit.  It’s a moment of pure live energy that has to be seen. And hell, I think I even saw the otherwise-dead-serious John smile for half a second.

Where does this magic happen nowadays? 

Fuck MTV. I can’t remember the last time they played anything resembling music, much less an entire video or performance that wasn’t sponsored on multiple levels, with a neon Taco Bell backdrop and band members contractually obligated to include three Axe body spray plugs in their between-song banter, all while wearing glowing Verizon bluetooth earpieces.

I don’t expect to turn on my TV and find anything that probes beneath the first or second layer. Nothing digs into the meat. Nothing grabs you by the throat, the balls, even the arm. Sure, PBS is trying to sell a DVD of the show for a hundred bucks, but that’s to keep the station up and running, since they don’t rely on traditional advertising. 

PBS fucking rocks.

For most intents and purposes, Moon and Entwistle were the shadow men to Townshend’s guitar-god illuminati and Daltrey’s coiffed peacock- but they were no less a part in the evolutionary principle of rock that the Who stood for. The placement of rhythm instruments at the sonic forefront of the band was a dangerous thing for an act to do at the time- especially considering that their drummer didn’t keep time so much as throw percussive tantrums.

I was halfway through this piece when I discovered that Keith actually died 30 years ago today. The man who defined cheerful debauchery when Van Halen and Mötley Crüe were still pissing themselves, who blew up his drum kit on The Smothers Brothers Show and toilets with M-80s, who drove a car into a hotel swimming pool. The man whose manic, animalistic drumming was the tree-trunk backbone to an incredible sonic movement. Dead. Ironically, the man known as much for his voracious narcotic appetite as his musical accomplishments OD’d on a drug that battles the symptoms of alcohol withdrawal.

Only two weeks earlier, Who Are You was released. The cover is a creepy exhibit in foreshadowing, given that the bloated, fragile-looking Moon was sitting center-frame, on a backwards chair with a back that read “Not To Be Taken Away.”