A New Triumph for The Who

By JAY COCKS

The seminal British rockers conquer New York

We needed to be reminded. Of all the promise and possibility of rock. Of its dangers, and the reasons for facing them down. Of its limits, and the necessity of testing them, trampling them and resetting them still higher. Whether there's a question of age, relevance and survival, or a more general concern about definition and direction, all doubts were settled, and all bets were off, when The Who played five sold-out dates at Madison Square Garden.

New Drummer Kenny Jones hit the downbeat. John Entwistle ran out a bass line as strong as a backbone. Roger Daltrey strutted and sang, and Pete Townshend, leaping, launched them all into Substitute. At that opening moment last week, The Who set new standards, redeemed old promises and put a few ghosts to rest. These concerts may become not only one of the seminal rock events of 1979 but a route dynamited into the new decade.

Throughout their 15-year history of standout record sales (U.S. and Canada totals: over 10 million) and intramural brawling, The Who have always pushed hard, even when they were teasing their audience and torturing themselves, and the band's loyalists have responded with exacting, even grueling, expectations.

There were times when The Who, and Townshend in particular, were unable to deliver. Sometimes, too, Townshend even questioned his own willingness to deliver. At times like these--around the release of Who Are You in 1978 and the death that year of Drummer Keith Moon at 32--a certain kind of frantic hopelessness sets in, and the fans respond with a terrible wounded fury, with their own dark suspicions that, as Townshend once wrote, "the song is over."

The indelible message of the Garden concerts was survival. The Who spent the '70s riding out the trends and passing tempests of this irresolute rock-musical decade. Now they are ready to rise above them. Since Moon was their prime anarchic spirit, a blithe and murderous clown as well as a killer drummer, his passing could have taken the edge of risk and controlled madness from the band, left them without a storm center. But the unsentimental truth has proved to be that the lessons of geometry do not necessarily apply, and that in rock the whole is sometimes greater than the sum of its parts. The Who endure partly on their own wild momentum, partly on the strength of Townshend's compositions--some of the most brilliant, adventurous and lacerating in all rock--and partly on the indestructibility of the covenant with the fans, who will never let their band off easy.

Townshend, 34, has been wrestling with the dynamic connection between his audience and his music ever since he wrote My Generation. One, indeed, is the life's blood of the other. Early songs like My Generation (with its stuttered chorus, "Why don't you all f-f-f-f-fade away") and The Kids Are Alright were youth anthems in the best sense, brash and savage declarations of independence. Even the rock opera Tommy, with its dazzling music locked in perpetual combat with a convoluted narrative, passed the palm to the audience as Tommy sang to his followers: "Listening to you I get the music/ Gazing at you I get the heat." Reverse the title of Who Are You, and the point comes clear; listen to Music Must Change, one of the album's best cuts, and Townshend's fusion of music and audience is complete: "Deep in the back of my mind is an unrealized sound ... Confirmed in the eyes of the kids/ Emphasized with their fists."

Fists were raised in delirious salute throughout much of the 2 1/2-hour Garden concerts as the fans and the band urged each other on. Among contemporary musicians, only Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band have the same force. They share a kindred commitment to the fans, and a similar ambition: to shake up and exalt the audience, to disturb the peace. This kind of rock-'n'-roll communion is strictly hardcore. The limousine crowd does not turn out in force for a Who date, and the concerts are not likely to be the topic of lively debate around Elaine's. Leave that audience to the Rolling Stones, who like to look like something scraped off a bad piece of cheese and who play for people who mostly hear rock during binges at their favorite boutique. The Who still play for the kids, an audience that has nothing to do with age. These kids are anyone for whom rock 'n' roll is far from entertainment and matter of life and death.

The tour is done now. In typically eccentric Who fashion, the concerts were staged only in the New York area, partly to plug a tough and raucous film version of Quadrophenia, Townshend's ambitious chronicle of the battles between the mods and the rockers in the back streets and beach resorts of 1960s Britain. Much more, though, the appearance seems like a testing of the waters that turned into a tidal wave. Word is that The Who will be back in the States come December, making a wider swing along the East Coast and through the Midwest, and demonstrating that they can still sing "Hope I die before I get old" with passion and impunity. What a way to bring in the '80s.

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