CULTURAL BITS: "When I Was A Boy," by John Entwistle and The Who.

John Entwistle (1944 - 2002) played bass guitar for The Who, but "Thunderfingers" was much more than just one-half of the band's rhythm section. Entwistle was a multi-instrumentalist who could sing and write his own songs. His contributions to The Who's overall sound may not seem apparent at first, but guitarist (and musical mastermind) Pete Townshend understood quite well.

John’s bass sound was like a Messiaen organ. Every note, every harmonic in the sky. When he passed away and I did the first few shows without him, with Pino [Palladino] on bass, he was playing without all that stuff ... I said, "Wow, I have a job.”

A quick primer.

As for Enwistle's songwriting, a dry and often black humor was his specialty.

"My Wife" perhaps is best known, with "Boris the Spider" coming next. There's also "Whiskey Man" from the band's earlier days. They're wonderful, and there also are dark horses like "Heaven and Hell," a non-album track at one time featured in The Who's live shows; "Success Story" from The Who By Numbers, a wry tale of rock and roll religion; and the science fiction saga of "905," which is a highlight of Who Are You, the band's final album with Keith Moon.

One I particularly enjoy is another non-album track, "When I Was A Boy," which borrows just a bit of inspiration from the verse in Corinthians:

When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things.

Entwistle's song begins accordingly.

When I was a baby I hadn't a care in the world,
But now I'm a man, my troubles fill my head,
When I was five it was good to be alive,
But now I'm a man, I wish that I were dead.

And later:

When I was a boy I had the mind of a boy,
But now I'm a man, ain't got no mind at all,
When I was in my teens I had my share of dreams,
But now I'm a man, ain't got no dreams at all.

The chorus arrives at the point.

My how time rushes by
The moment you're born you start to die
Time waits for no man
And your life's spent, it's over before you begin

Or maybe those aren't the actual words in the last line, even if they're frequently reported as such. What I hear is this:

"And your lifespan is over before it begins," or even better, "And your lifespan is over before it began."

Any way you cut it, it's a downer of a song calculated to step all over your buzz -- and the older I become, the more I can relate to it. At 59, I've outlived "The Ox" by 20 months ... but it's all downhill from here.

As comedian Rodney Dangerfield said, "At my age, if I don't drink, don't smoke, and eat only certain foods, what can I look forward to? From this point on, if I take excellent care of myself -- I'll get very sick and die."

Entwistle didn't wait for old age. He left behind one hell of a legacy, though.

“When I Was a Boy”: Adulthood Stinks

"Join Together: The Who & the Sixties," a presentation at the Carnegie Center this Saturday.

Perhaps I should pay closer attention. I was neither aware of this book, nor that the author is booked for a gig at the Carnegie Center this Saturday.

Carnegie Center for Art and History
201 East Spring St.
New Albany, IN 47150

It crushes my soul to write these words: in 2018, it will be 40 years since Keith Moon died. It's almost as hard to imagine a 70-year-old Moon as it is a Miller Lite that actually tastes great. We've been without John Entwistle since 2002, but Roger Daltrey has a solo album coming out soon. Pete Townshend remains the one musician of his era who I'd join for a pint in the pub if given the chance. 

I'm going to try and make this one.

---

JOIN TOGETHER: THE WHO & THE SIXTIES

SATURDAY, APRIL 14 ... 1:00 - 2:00 PM

Casey Harison will depict the social impact of the British rock band on the youth culture in his presentation. Registration is requested and can be easily done by calling 812.944.7336 or emailing Delesha Thomas at dthomas@carnegiecenter.org. The presentation will take place in the Jane Barth Anderson Meeting Room.

The Who were one of the most successful bands of the 1960s British Invasion. They set themselves apart from other bands by their smart and timely songs, loudness, and habit of destroying instruments at the end of their performances. If The Who had done nothing else, they would have secured a place in rock ‘n roll history for high volume, smashed guitars and kicked-over drum kits. But The Who also played a role in the American and British counterculture movement of the late 1960s. This presentation reviews the encounter between the band and the counterculture generation from the ‘Summer of Love’ in 1967, through Woodstock, the album ‘Tommy’ and the failed ‘Lifehouse’ project of the early 1970s.

Casey Harison has been a Professor of History at the University of Southern Indiana since 1992, and in 2011 was appointed director of the USI Center for Communal Studies. His research mostly revolves around Modern French and Atlantic history and teaches on several specialized courses such as the French Revolution and Napoleon, European Revolutions, History and Film and the Holocaust. His focus on The Who and their effects on the Counterculture led to the publication of his book, “Feedback: The Who and Their Generation.” Other notable accomplishments include the publication of a second book, “The Stonemasons of Creuse in Nineteenth-Century Paris,” two books as an editor or co-editor, and a number of articles that made appearances in journals like “French Historical Studies,” “Journal of Social History,” “Atlantic Studies,” and more.

Two hours of the The Who, live in San Francisco (August, 2017).

I've been a fan of The Who since high school, and of course it can't be the same now, with Moon and Entwistle long gone, and Townshend and Daltrey both in their early seventies.

It can't be the same, but this is a surprisingly good concert artifact from August of 2017: The Who 2017-08-13 Outside Lands Music & Arts Festival.

ON THE AVENUES: Ain't it funny how we all seem to look the same? On Quadrophenia, from 2013.

ON THE AVENUES: Ain't it funny how we all seem to look the same?

A weekly column by Roger A. Baylor.

This one's a reprint. 

Emerging from the shadows of The Dolphin pub in Plymouth’s Barbican, we began walking toward the harbor, the open sea visible to the south.

Then a steadily mounting, weirdly mechanized buzzing was heard just around the corner.

Were we being pursued by lawnmowers?

Soon the street was filled with flashy vintage motor scooters, piloted mostly by older men wearing strange archaic clothing from long ago, and suddenly I experienced a devastating flashback from somewhere deep within my Indiana heartland soul … but why?

How could someone corn-fed like me, born and raised thousands of miles away – who didn’t visit England until he was 38 years old – possibly experience Sixties-back-dated déjà vu on a Devon quayside in the year 2009?

Elementary, my dear Jimmy: It's Quadrophenia, that’s how.

When the whirring subsided and the scooters disappeared around the bend, my wife’s cousin explained that The Who’s seminal 1973 album had been adapted and restaged as a musical by its writer, Pete Townshend. The show would be playing at the Theatre Royal Plymouth, and so we bought tickets and attended a performance.

It was cleverly done, with a group of young vocalists and instrumentalists gleefully blasting their letter-perfect way through passages made immortal by Townshend (guitar and vocals), Roger Daltrey (vocals), John Entwistle (bass and brass) and Keith Moon (drums and percussion).

Tears kept working their way toward my eyes throughout, because Quadrophenia inevitably works that way for me.

---

The basic facts about Quadrophenia are well known. It was conceived by Townshend as a concept album, embracing aspects of post-war British cultural history utterly remote from the American experience.

The protagonist Jimmy is a Mod; on the other side of the “contrasting ethos” aisle are the Rockers. These rival gangs have virtually everything in common when it comes to shared white ethnicity and socio-economic futility in post-war Great Britain; duly deprived of larger differences, they fight endlessly over small patches of turf defined primarily by style, fashion and attitude.

Jimmy’s personality is explained as a four-part disorder of conflicting emotions, perhaps “quad-polar” in amateur 2017 newspeak. Each of these emotions further symbolizes a band member: Introspective “beggar” (Townshend); tough guy and “helpless dancer” (Daltrey); groping romantic (Entwistle) and manic lunatic (Moon).

In turn, each of Jimmy’s personalities is scored as a musical theme, and in operatic fashion, these themes are stated through bookending instrumentals (“Quadrophenia” and “The Rock”), and seeded throughout the narrative. All of it comes to an epiphany in “Love Reign O’er Me,” the album’s closing song.

Arguably, Quadropenia is The Who’s aggregate musical pinnacle. It fuses the players’ greatest individual strengths during a period just before weariness and attrition began taking their toll. Astoundingly, not one of them was 30 years old when Quadrophenia was recorded.

As a whole, while oblique to American ears, Jimmy’s saga makes far better sense than Tommy, the group’s better known album. Upon release, Quadrophenia was by no means acclaimed as an “instant” classic, but it has aged remarkably well, with its deeper, layered textures successfully maturing over time.

Like Pink Floyd’s album The Wall, Quadrophenia’s universals are capable of creative reinvention apart from their original milieu. These days, Tommy as a whole seems positively impoverished by comparison.

However, Quadrophenia’s enduring resonance in my own singular existence has much less to do with the details of its birth and subsequent reincarnations than with an unquestioned, bedrock fact of the rock and roll canon in its most expansive sense, because in the end, the music is all about me.

Pete Townshend, that distant Englishman, actually addressed me personally – one listener out of millions – with Quadrophenia, an album I first heard at 13 years of age and found bafflingly impenetrable, but a few short years later, gratefully embraced as fully capable of addressing the innermost labyrinths of my far-off Hoosier world in a way that was just plain uncanny, and remains inexplicable these many years later.

Why not? After all, that’s rock and roll.

---

In retrospect, it is clear to me that from a very early age, I’ve harbored inclinations toward cantankerousness, rebellion and insolence. Curmudgeonly cynicism is my destiny.

However, these traits took a while to coalesce into a doctrine for daily living. Like so many other teenagers, I couldn’t always find words or principles to articulate my thoughts, and when I became aware of The Who and Townshend’s terse early statements of doubt, self-loathing and alienation (“Can’t Explain” and “Substitute”), contrasting with outbursts of aggression and bravado (“My Generation” and “Anyway Anyhow Anywhere”), they definitely served as an influence.

But I can be a very slow learner and a comically late bloomer. To grasp the broader implications of Quadrophenia, I had to grow a bit older and be knocked good and hard upside the noggin (in a metaphorical sense). My inevitable comeuppance came in 1979.

Although captivated by my philosophy and history courses, I was muddling disinterestedly through university, completely clueless about the future. Then, providentially, I met a girl, and for the first time ever, there was seeming clarity, because naturally, as with every TV show I’d viewed since the boob tube became my de facto babysitter in 1963, there would ensue a storybook romance, marriage, a career to pay the bills, children, softball, holidays … and so forth, until at last, decades later, I’d find myself seated in one of Thornton Wilder’s wooden stage chairs.

This stunningly short-lived relationship proved as epochal as I’d imagined, except for all the “wrong” reasons – at least at the time. In retrospect, it simply isn’t possible to overstate my foolishness and immaturity; even worse, these conditions were just as uncomfortably obvious to me as the remainder of the world.

A lifetime of coddled pop song lyric gullibility was no preparation for this “happily ever after” plot line to be squashed unceremoniously underfoot, but there was a cassette handy for consolation: Quadrophenia. Pete -- well, he knew exactly what it felt like, and I listened to his prescription every day for weeks on end.

---

On February 16, 2013 the surviving members of The Who came to Louisville and staged a compelling revival of Quadrophenia, performed in its entirety.

The story of how I first came to appreciate the album occurred a thousand or more years ago. It was the jump-start to a process of self-discovery that happily has not ever stopped since, and yet oddly, just as Pavlov’s famous mutt can’t remember exactly why he’s salivating, not a one of my founding Quadrophenia myths surfaced during last Saturday’s performance. Instead (finally?) I just enjoyed the music. The rest of the historical document didn’t seem to matter.

Maybe Quadrophenia by the Who at the Yum Brands Arena isn’t very local at all, but when it comes to mythology, maybe we need it to be arena-sized, and not confined to a busker’s cubbyhole. Maybe we’re always looking for selected whole-planet universals to help us sort through our own small-pond particulars. Maybe music functions as precisely such a religion in my own innermost world.

Maybe I’m kidding myself, because I know it does.

Tears get in my eyes. Music like Quadrophenia inevitably works that way for me.

---

Recent columns:

April 6: ON THE AVENUES: On swill and tornadoes, circa '75.

March 30: ON THE AVENUES: Our great and noble leader is here to stay, so let's break out the țuică and make a joyful noise.

March 23: ON THE AVENUES: Cataloguing my consciousness on a warm spring day.

March 16: ON THE AVENUES: It's all so simple, says Jeff Gahan.Remove the impoverished, and voila! No more poverty!

From The Who to Errol Flynn's Don Juan in two early morning song snippets.

As an expression of the strange way my brain processes and recalls music, consider two tunes playing interchangeably in my mind as I awoke this morning. Note that music plays constantly in my head, although deciphering the wacky algorithm responsible for selecting the playlist has proven impossible.

First, "Put the Money Down," a song by the Who, from an album I haven't played in years.

This cut, recorded at roughly the same time as the songs appearing on the classic 1971 album Who's Next, first appeared on the compilation album Odds & Sods in 1974. It is by no means a well known track by my favorite band, which returns to Louisville early next year on its 50th anniversary (and purportedly final) tour.

Two days ago, I read a long interview with survivng members Pete Townshend and Roger Daltrey at the on-line portal of a British newspaper. Did this somehow dislodge "Put the Money Down" from a shelf in the cranium ... or is it how perfectly the song's weary, angry and cynical lyrics describe local phenomenons like New Albany's Main Street Disprovement, Deforestation and Semi Trailer Non-Diversion Project, and my reaction to them?

Even more obscurely, also greeting me this morning was a theme from the 1948 Errol Flynn film, The Adventures of Don Juan. You'll hear it 12 seconds into this suite of Max Steiner's music from the movie.

Flynn's career headed south shortly after this one, but briefly, some of the old magic returned. Here's a clip.

Now, imagine New Albany's own Josh Dallas playing the role of Flynn in a biopic based on Flynn's colorful life.

Just saying.

Richard Atnip, if you're reading this ... pass the word, please. Do you see where the music leads me?

I've got your Super Moon.

Documentary: "Quadrophenia: Can You See the Real Me?"

The YouTube link is here: Quadrophenia: Can You See the Real Me? (BBC4 Documentary). The documentary is about 70 minutes long, and so you may wish to go there instead of watching here. The official BBC 4 documentary page has further details.

When the Who played Yum a couple months back, it inspired a column: ON THE AVENUES: Ain't it funny how we all seem to look the same?

There is likely to be yet another column soon on the topic of Pete Townshend's autobiography, "Who I Am." I've read it. I'm still digesting it -- much as with Quadrophenia, these many years later.

ON THE AVENUES: Ain't it funny how we all seem to look the same?

ON THE AVENUES: Ain't it funny how we all seem to look the same?

A weekly web column by Roger A. Baylor.

We emerged from the shadows of The Dolphin pub in Plymouth’s Barbican and began walking toward the harbor, the open sea visible in the distance to the south, when a steadily mounting, mechanized buzzing was heard around the corner.

Were we being pursued by lawnmowers?

Soon the street was filled with flashy vintage motor scooters, piloted mostly by older men wearing archaic clothing from some time long ago, and suddenly there came a devastating flashback from somewhere within my Indiana heartland soul … but why? How could someone like me, born and raised thousands of miles away, who never even visited England until 1998, possibly experience Sixties-back-dated déjà vu on a Devon quayside in the year 2009?

Quadrophenia, that’s how.

Unbeknownst to us, at least until the whirring eventually subsided and my wife’s cousin deigned to explain, the Who’s seminal 1973 album was being adapted and restaged as a musical by its writer, Pete Townshend. The show would be playing at the Theatre Royal Plymouth, and so we bought tickets and attended a performance. It was cleverly done, with a group of young vocalists and instrumentalists gleefully blasting their letter-perfect way through passages made immortal by Townshend (guitar and vocals), Roger Daltrey (vocals), John Entwistle (bass and brass) and Keith Moon (drums and percussion).

Tears were in my eyes throughout, because Quadrophenia always works that way for me.

---

The basic facts are well known. Quadrophenia was conceived by Townshend as a concept album embracing aspects of post-war British cultural history utterly remote from the American experience. Jimmy, the protagonist, is a Mod; on the other side of the contrasting ethos aisle are the Rockers. These rival gangs have everything in common when it comes to their shared white ethnicity and socio-economic futility in Great Britain; duly deprived of larger differences, they fight endlessly over small patches of turf defined primarily by styles, fashions and attitudes.

Jimmy’s personality is explained as a four-part disorder (perhaps “quad-polar” in amateur newspeak) of conflicting emotions, each of them further symbolized by a band member: Introspective “beggar” (Townshend); tough guy and “helpless dancer” (Daltrey); groping romantic (Entwistle) and manic lunatic (Moon). In turn, each of Jimmy’s personalities is scored as a musical theme, and in operatic fashion, these themes are stated through bookending instrumentals (“Quadrophenia” and “The Rock”), woven through the narrative, and brought to an epiphany in “Love Reign O’er Me.”

Arguably, Quadropenia is the Who’s aggregate musical pinnacle, fusing the players’ greatest individual strengths during a period just before weariness and attrition began taking their toll. Astoundingly, not one of them was 30 years old when Quadrophenia was recorded. As a whole, while oblique, Jimmy’s saga makes far better sense than that of Tommy, the group’s better known album. Upon release, Quadrophenia was no “instant” classic, but it has aged quite well, its deeper, layered textures successfully maturing over time. Like Pink Floyd’s The Wall, Quadrophenia’s universals are capable of creative reinvention apart from their original milieu. These days, Tommy seems positively impoverished by comparison.

However, Quadrophenia’s enduring resonance has less to do with the details of its birth and subsequent reincarnations than with an unquestioned, bedrock fact of the rock and roll canon in its most expansive sense, because in the end, the music’s all about me.

Pete Townshend, that distant Englishman, addressed me – one listener out of millions – with Quadrophenia, an album I first heard at 13 years of age and found utterly impenetrable, but a few short years later, gratefully embraced as fully capable of addressing the innermost labyrinths of my far-off Hoosier world in a way that was just plain uncanny, and remains inexplicable these many years later.

Why not?

That’s rock and roll.

---

In retrospect, it is clear to me that from a very early age, I’ve harbored inclinations toward cantankerousness, rebellion and insolence. Curmudgeonly is my destiny. Granted, these traits took a while to coalesce into a doctrine for daily living. Like so many teenagers, I couldn’t always find words or principles to articulate my thoughts, and when I became aware of the Who and Townshend’s terse early statements of doubt, self-loathing and alienation (“Can’t Explain” and “Substitute”), contrasting with outbursts of aggression and bravado (“My Generation” and “Anyway Anyhow Anywhere”), they definitely were an influence.

But I can be a very slow learner and a very late bloomer. To grasp the broader implications of Quadrophenia, I had to grow a bit older and be knocked good and hard on the noggin in a metaphorical sense. My inevitable comeuppance came in 1979.

Although captivated by my philosophy and history courses, I was muddling disinterestedly through university, completely clueless about the future. Then, providentially, I met a girl, and for the first time ever, there was seeming clarity, because naturally, as with every TV show I’d viewed since the boob tube became my de facto babysitter in 1963, there would ensue a storybook romance, marriage, a career to pay the bills, children, softball, holidays … and so forth, until at last, decades later, I’d find myself seated in one of Thornton Wilder’s wooden stage chairs.

This stunningly short-lived relationship proved as providential as I’d imagined, only for all the “wrong” reasons – at the time. In retrospect, it simply isn’t possible to overstate my foolishness and immaturity; even worse, these conditions were just as uncomfortably obvious to me then. A lifetime of coddled pop song lyric gullibility was no preparation for a “happily ever after” plot line to be squashed unceremoniously underfoot, but there was a cassette handy for offering consolation: Quadrophenia. Pete knew what it felt like, and I listened to his prescription every day for weeks on end.

---

On February 16, the surviving members of the Who came to Louisville and staged a compelling revival of Quadrophenia, performed in its entirety. The story of how I first came to appreciate the album occurred a thousand or more years ago. It was the jumpstart to a process of self-discovery that happily hasn’t stopped since, and yet oddly, just as Pavlov’s famous mutt can’t remember exactly why he’s salivating, not a one of my founding Quadrophenia myths surfaced during last Saturday’s performance. Instead, I just enjoyed the music. The rest of the historical document just didn’t seem to matter.

Maybe Quadrophenia by the Who at the Yum Brands Arena isn’t very local at all, but when it comes to mythology, maybe we need it to be arena-sized, and not confined to a busker’s cubbyhole. Maybe we’re always looking for selected whole planet universals to help us sort through our own small pond particulars. Maybe music functions as just such a religion in my own innermost world.

Maybe I’m kidding myself, because I know it does.

Tears get in my eyes. Music like Quadrophenia always works that way for me.

Quadrophenia: On Simon, Scott and the dirty jobs.

As there is time, I'll write more about the Who's performance of "Quadrophenia" on Saturday night, but first, two subplots.

Simon Townshend is Pete Townshend's (quite) younger brother, and he has long performed with his sibling in the studio and on tours, and is often featured on lead guitar. Simon also is a regular member of Roger Daltrey's touring band. In fact, a highlight of Daltrey's gig at Horseshoe Casino a few year's back was Simon's passionate reading of "Goin' Mobile."

It's my only clear memory of the Daltrey show, apart from watching, fascinated, as the elderly Daltrey showed more and more cleavage as the evening progressed (the missus asks whether Daltrey, 68, has had plastic surgery on his chest).

One of Simon's own regular bandmates is drummer Scott Devours, also a Daltrey sideman, whose name reached national ears earlier this month when he became a last-minute, emergency substitute for regular Who drummer Zak Starkey (Ringo Starr's son), who became ill and unable to play two or three shows preceding the one in Louisville. I was expecting Devours to play drums on Saturday.

On Saturday night, Simon took the lead on "The Dirty Jobs" and did a fine job with this criminally under-rated song; upon closer examination, he's been singing it during Who performances since the mid-1990's and seems to have adopted it as his own.

And, Zak returned to the drum kit on Saturday night. He is the lynchpin of late period Who, a band that seems to have dispensed with the notion of audible rock and roll bass since the Ox died.

But: If there were any remaining doubts as to the ability of Devours to occupy Zak's chair, watch and listen (above) as he quotes Keith Moon's drum licks like a true disciple, while Simon's band does "The Dirty Jobs."

"It's easy to see that you are one of us -- ain't it funny how we all seem to look the same?"

I insist on thinking that Thomas Barrow would approve.

The kids are alright, then as now.

The Who, Quadrophenia and "13 essential Keith Moon moments."

The Who is coming to Yum on February 16, playing the album Quadrophenia in its entirety. Tickets already are in my possession. Since this is my favorite work by the Who, there was no way I'd miss what might be the final chance to see Pete Townshend and Roger Daltrey perform live as the Who.

Through the immediacy of YouTube, it is possible to view clever video tributes to drummer Keith Moon ("Bell Boy," above) and bassist John Entwistle (on "5:15). They're a nice touch, indeed.

Moonie remains a hero from my forgotten days of youth, and it is staggering to realize that he's been gone for 34 years. Here's a solid appreciation from 2008.

13 essential Keith Moon moments, by Ed Masley (The Arizona Republic)

He was the greatest drummer rock and roll will ever see, a madcap force of nature whose attention-grabbing antics rarely held him back from landing on the beat -- even when tumbling his way through any number of the most chaotic, most exuberant drum fills in the history of rock.

Keith Moon was 32 the day his self-destructive lifestyle got the better of him, 30 years ago this very weekend -- on Sept. 7.

Here's a look at some essential moments in the life a man whose proved, conclusively, that sometimes more is more.

Must read (coming soon): "Who I Am," by Pete Townshend.

Revisiting "The Who by Numbers".

I awaken most mornings to music in my head. Who knows what prompts these flashbacks?



If the original lineup of the Who had ever played Saturday Night Live, this is the song they would have played.



Later on the same album from 1975, bassist John Enwistle contributed one of his best ever tunes, deserving of a full lyrical reprint.

Friday night, I'm on my way home
They ought to make work a crime
I'm home for the weekend
I'm gonna make the most of my time
There's a rock and roll singer on the television
Giving up his music, gonna take up religion
Deserted rock and roll
To try to save his soul


Saturday night, I got a gig with the band
Playing the electric guitar
Someday I'm gonna make it
Gonna be a super duper star
Get a big flashy car
And a house for my Mum
The big break better happen soon
'Cause I'm pushing twenty-one


Just like Cinderella when she couldn't go to the ball
A voice said "I'm your fairy manager, you shall play the Carnegie Hall"
I gotta give up my day job to become a heartthrob
I may go far if I smash my guitar


Away for the weekend
I've gotta play some one-night stands
Six for the tax man
And one for the band
Back in the studio
To make our latest number one
Take two hundred and seventy six
You know, this used to be fun


Monday morning, I just got home
Six and the birds are singing
I need a drink and my clothes are wet
Oooh and my ears are still ringing
There's a rock and roll singer bopping on the TV
He used to be a preacher but now he sings in a major key
Amended his decision
To the new religion



While "The Who by Numbers" isn't usually considered one of the group's finest recordings, you can see there were moments of high achievement, including Pete Townshend's sublime ukulele piece, performed here decades later.

Problem is, there are no (passenger) trains.

Actually, I can explain.

In case you were wondering how my favorite band sounded when they/it mattered ...



I love the Who, but when will the Super Bowl get it?

Music on DVD: "The Who at Kilburn: 1977."

To soothe the perpetual inner discord associated with the holiday season, I recently purchased a DVD – not as a gift, but for my own personal, medicinal use: “The Who at Kilburn: 1977.” Included is a second bonus disc that has archival footage from a 1969 gig at the London Coliseum.

Although separated by eight years, both performances are noteworthy, providing compelling evidence of the distance traveled by the bands at the time, and by the survivors in the decades since.

The Kilburn show originated as part of the filming of Jeff Stein’s documentary about the band, “The Kids Are Alright,” which was released in 1978. Although beautifully filmed, the band’s performance at Kilburn was deemed patchy and inferior, primarily because Pete Townshend, Roger Daltrey, John Entwistle and Keith Moon had not played together in over a year. Only a small bit of the show made it into the movie’s final cut, which featured another show at Shepperton in early 1978.

Having now had the chance to view the previously unreleased footage, it is clear to me that the verdict of posterity differs from that of the filmmaker at the time. While it remains indisputable that Moon was in decline during both film-inspired sessions, the deterioration is far less noticeable in the Kilburn historical record than in the later performance at Shepperton, which proved to be his last.

Yes, it takes some time for the monolith to shift into gear. Once it does, the results are edifying.

The film quality of the bonus segment from 1969 is crude, and the sound sometimes muddled, yet overall, it is simply remarkable. Here is the band at its very peak – young and brash, but honed to a razor’s edge of professionalism by continuous touring in support of “Tommy.” There is no stage adornment, merely four musicians roaring through staples of the band’s early catalog, and a few welcomed rarities seldom heard live subsequently.

During Sunday’s televised football games, there were numerous ads touting the Kennedy Center 31st anniversary fete to be aired tonight, at which surviving band members Townshend and Daltrey will be honored for their legacy. It takes only a passing knowledge of the band’s history to know that Townshend, perhaps the best interview in all of rock music, would have something to say about the tribute.

Kennedy Center Honorees Roger Daltrey and Pete Townshend ...

To Townshend's amazement, the world's appetite for the music he wrote in his 20s and 30s has never gone away. If you had told him at 19 -- a sullen Ealing Art School dropout with a baronial nose -- that he'd be singing "I Can't Explain" in his twilight years, he would have guffawed. But that song and a few dozen others, like "Pinball Wizard," "My Generation" and "Baba O'Riley," are among the most beloved baubles in rock's permanent collection. Although the band has officially retired a few times, we keep demanding that the Who re-form, and with some ambivalence, Townshend keeps saying yes.

I’ve always shared the guitarist’s ambivalence, wondering whether the periodic high points of the contemporary version of the group justified the longevity, or whether it would have been better in an artistic sense to die young and stay pretty.

In the end, a world without The Who seems quite unimaginable to me, so rock on … but don’t expect me to be watching the Kennedy Center affair.

Cringing makes my face hurt.

A musical interlude with The Who.

My old pal Mark phoned from Maine earlier tonight to let me know that December 11, 2008, is the 40th anniversary of the Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus, originally a concert staged and filmed in London, but unreleased until 1996.

Legend has it that Mick Jagger was both disappointed in his own group’s performance and awed by the set played by The Who, and as a result, he withheld the show from public view for a quarter century. This may or may not be true. However, it is undeniable that The Who in its original incarnation was seldom better than here.

The song is “A Quick One,” which was Pete Townshend’s initial attempt to write an extended thematic piece made up of shorter segments. Roger Daltrey sings, and the irreplaceable rhythm section of John Entwistle (bass) and the beloved Keith Moon (drums) raises the roof. Moon the Loon has been dead for 30 years. It simply doesn't seem right.

How much does the senior editor appreciate YouTube? Enjoy.