The Who is the greatest rock ‘n’ roll band of all time.
True or False?
When it comes to ranking rock bands, nostalgia and hyperbole rule. But when it comes to this choice – traditionally a battle royale among The Who, The Beatles, the Rolling Stones and a select few others – music fans pick their words carefully.
“More than any other group that ever was, the Who were our role models,” U2’s Bono famously said in 1990. “I love them and hate them for that.”
David Bowie once said the group had created a template for others to admire, use, follow.
“The considered and intelligent use of so-called ‘art-theory,’ actively engaged with rock music, was merely one of Pete’s phenomenally important contributions to the new language of rock,” Bowie said.
Said with less subtlety: “They’re the greatest performing group ever,” said longtime concert promoter Barry Fey.
The Who will bring their rock show to the Pepsi Center on Tuesday in support of the new “Endless Wire” CD, and even though the British band is playing years after the loss of drummer Keith Moon and bassist John Entwistle, the group fronted by Roger Daltrey on vocals and Pete Townshend on lead guitar is still considered one of those bands you have to see – multiple times, ideally – before you die.
As kids, Daniel and Jake Sproul weren’t exposed to The Who around their family’s Boulder-area home. That rock ‘n’ roll education came later when they discovered the seminal band together.
“It opened up my eyes to a whole different world of guitar playing and songwriting,” Daniel Sproul said last week. “Pete (Townshend) is the master of the power chord and melody. It’s also the whole other thing, that the four staples of rock ‘n’ roll are The Who, The Beatles, the Stones and Dylan.”
It’s that admiration that has the Sproul brothers’ heads spinning lately. As it turns out, the Sproul brothers’ Boulder-rooted rock band, Rose Hill Drive, was the sole opener for The Who last week on a West Coast swing that took them from Canada to Southern California. And Daniel Sproul, talking from San Jose’s HP Pavilion last week, where he was to open for Pete, Roger and the boys a few hours later, was overwhelmed.
“It’s so surreal,” he said. “It’s unbelievable. They play ‘Baba O’Riley,’ and Pete sings that line, ‘Don’t cry/Don’t raise your eye/It’s only teenage wasteland,’ and the whole crowd sings it with him. The power of his songs, and the power of the band and how it’s changed so many people’s lives, is unreal.”
It’s simple to throw The Who, Dylan and the Stones into the same, loose categorization. They’re all seminal rock acts from the ’60s, yes. But they’re also all still regularly touring, and critics and fans have also long labeled these acts boomer bands. And while their careers have varied wildly throughout the years, there is the common thread of longevity and continued contributions.
“I hope I die before I get old,” is the lyric that will forever haunt The Who. But now Townshend and Daltrey are changing their tune. In front of a recent New York audience, Towns-
hend provided some interstitial singing between songs: “Hope I die … Hope I die before I get old … I hope I get old … What am I gonna be when I grow up?”
The sentiment is sweet and seemingly genuine. Especially given his position as rock’s elder statesman, Townshend can be surprisingly frank.
“I don’t think that the big boomer bands are going to be able to do this much longer – I really don’t,” Townshend told Jenny Eliscu in Rolling Stone recently. “I don’t want to go out and see Bob Dylan. I don’t want to go out and see the Stones. I wouldn’t pay money to go see the Who, not even with new songs. I wouldn’t pay money to go see Crosby, Stills and Nash. They (expletive) make me sick.
“When I say that, what I mean is I’m ageist about it. I don’t want to look at these old guys in their self-congratulatory mode.”
And that’s what makes The Who so important, still more than four decades after their formation in London. They realize the need for new material, and their new material – “Endless Wire” is their first record in 24 years – is worthwhile. A few years ago, Townshend found himself thinking, “I don’t need to play old Who songs. I could sell them to (expletive) ‘CSI.”‘
“When John died, I decided that if I were to ever go back on tour with Roger, it has to be artistically driven,” Townshend told Eliscu. “I thought, ‘If we’re going to do this, we have to have new music, and it has to come from me.”‘
One of rock’s greatest songwriters – if not the genre’s greatest craftsman – gives good reason to make a trip out to the Pepsi Center this week.
Pop music critic Ricardo Baca can be reached at 303-954-1394 or rbaca@denverpost.com.
You know Who
From its early incarnations as The Detours and The High Numbers, the band that morphed into The Who in 1964 played “maximum R&B,” charting a map for the power chords and rock operas to come.
Here are five seminal Who songs that influenced a generation of rock bands.
“I Can’t Explain”: The Who’s first hit in 1965 was a bright burst of power pop. It caught the adolescent angst Pete Townshend would mine for a few years.
“My Generation”: The title track of The Who’s debut album (’65 in the U.K., ’66 in the U.S.) boasted Roger Daltrey’s stuttering delivery and the anthemic line, “Hope I die before I get old.” It marked the start of the band’s auto-destruct live shows: Great news for fans and London musical instrument retailers.
“Substitute”: Early on, Townshend emerged as a clever lyricist with an eye for class tension, bemoaning how he was “born with a plastic spoon in my mouth.”
“Won’t Get Fooled Again”: In the wake of the 1970 rock opera “Tommy,” this is one of rock’s great sonic yawps, fueled by Townshend’s crunching chords and drummer Keith Moon thrashing triple-time runs across his kit. Oh, yes: Daltrey’s primal scream.
“Baba O’Riley”: Synthesizers are now in play, and Townshend brings orchestral depth to this song on 1971’s “Who’s Next.” Still, the “teenage wasteland” remains a motif.
-William Porter
1970 show “greatest” for impresario Fey
When longtime concert promoter Barry Fey talks about the greatest show he’s ever seen, you listen. So here is that story, and another one, about The Who.
The Who first played Denver on June 9, 1970, and sold out Mammoth Gardens (now the Fillmore Auditorium) to its 5,000-ticket capacity. But it was one of the hottest days of the year, and the venue had no air conditioning; Fey knew he could not pack the place, so he cut admission off at 3,500 and offered refunds or tickets to a date the following night.
“Pete gets on the stage that night and said, ‘I guess you’ve all read that we’re never going to perform ‘Tommy’ live again,”‘ Fey recalled. “He winked at Daltrey and says ‘(expletive),’ and with that they went into ‘Tommy’ and two hours and 40 minutes of the greatest and most energetic music I’ve ever heard in rock ‘n’ roll.”
“You never knew what was going to happen because Keith Moon was crazy,” Fey said. “If he had not been such a brilliant drummer, he would have been institutionalized. … When he was alive, he tended to make Pete nuts.”
Fey once hosted a private dinner for the band, and at the end of the meal, attention was drawn to the massive centerpiece of flowers and plants that had sat at the center of the large table.
“Keith had very unobtrusively eaten the entire centerpiece,” Fey said. “Not in a ‘Ha-ha, watch me’ kind of way. He just ate them, very quietly.”
-Ricardo Baca
The Who
CLASSIC ROCK | Pepsi Center, 7 p.m. Tuesday with The Pretenders and Groove Hawgs opening | $56-$206 | ticketmaster.com, 303-830-8497
