The Who
I could hardly hear the poll workers when I went to vote this morning, and had to keep asking them to repeat themselves, because Allison and I saw The Who last night.
After four decades, Pete Townshend can still play the instrument. He and Roger Daltrey have aged, and their voices crack on the high notes, but they still put on a great show. It was two shows, really. At a certain point, they shifted gears into a string of high-octane crowd-pleasers, beginning with Won’t Get Fooled Again. They brought the lights down for the extended electronic bridge in the middle, and when they burst out of the gates with that famous scream — “yeeeeeeeeeah!” — and Townshend’s soaring guitar, the lights came up to reveal a whole stadium on its feet. The guy in front of us instinctively reached back for a high five.
After an explosive performance of Baba O’Riley, Townshend spoke briefly to the audience. “It took two or three weeks to write. It started as an electronic thing, then went all kinds of different directions before it finally came together. And I thought, there is just no fucking way the rock public is gonna get this song. It’s all Steve Reich, too nifty. And wherever we go, whenever we play it, it gets the longest applause.”
Now well into his elder statesman phase, Townshend strikes you as a soft-spoken friend of your father’s who just happens to moonlight in a kickass rock band, windmilling a red Strat in front of 8 4x12s. (Did I mention I can’t really hear today?) When he walked on, in a black T-shirt and black pants, he got halfway across the stage before the crowd realized he wasn’t one of the lighting crew. As the stadium burst into applause, he waved modestly, and Daltrey followed him on. Put Pete Townshend together with a delay pedal and you’ve got a lethal weapon. The Edge wishes he could take lessons from this guy. And the fact is, beneath all Townshend’s theatrics, he doesn’t hit a single wrong note.
Incidentally, Ticketmaster really knows how to do these shows: they bring in some godawful opening band — “we’re from Canada. I know you’ve never heard of us, but we started out in Detroit a couple weeks ago, and now here we are in Washington, opening for The Who!” — so by the time the main event actually begins, you couldn’t be happier. (Even if the main event were Leonard Nimoy covering Creedence Clearwater Revival.)
With the second leg of the set, the band was determined to get the rest of the audience on its feet. In the section next to ours, I saw girls in their twenties dancing wildly, and a 13-year old boy playing air guitar and mouthing all the lyrics. A 60-year old man was grinning deliriously from ear to ear.
An extended standing ovation brought the boys back out for an encore medley (Pinball Wizard, Sparks), and another had Townshend and Daltrey doing a little acoustic nightcap.
Waiting for our train afterwards, a middle-aged woman introduced her husband and told us, in slurred speech, “we’ve just come from a concert.”
We told her we had, too.
“They sound just like they did back in the day. You guys are probably too young to remember. What are you, in your twenties? I’m 20 years older than you.”
The Who is 20 years older than she is, and they still kick ass.