[Dixielandjazz] Review of The Who

[Stephen G Barbone]

Since we've been discussing The Who, here is the NY Times report about  
them and The Super Bowl Halftime show. Note the line: "It was music  
born to be heard in arenas and stadiums." IMO that says it all. Note  
also, these were songs of the 1960s.

Cheers,
Steve Barbone
www.myspace.com/barbonestreetjazzband

February 8, 2010 - NY Times - By Jon Pareles

In Halftime Show, the Who Exhibits Flashes of Age and Familiarity


Lasers, lights and fireworks were flashing full-tilt through the Who’s  
halftime show Sunday at Super Bowl XLIV. It looked as if the producers  
were worried that the rock geezers at the center — the guitarist and  
songwriter Pete Townshend, 64, and the singer Roger Daltrey, 65 —  
might not look heroic enough to the camera. Townshend, in a porkpie  
hat and shades with a black suit hanging off his lanky frame, was  
grizzled. Daltrey, in a striped neo-Mod jacket and a scarf, revealed a  
voice that was raspy and thick. But the Who still had the stadium  
shouting along on choruses Townshend wrote decades ago: “Who are you”  
and “We don’t get fooled again!”

The Who didn’t hazard “My Generation,” with its famous line “Hope I  
die before I get old,” or the other songs written in guitar-smashing  
youth as the Who got its start. (The band didn’t break any equipment  
for this finale, either.)

Instead, for what was probably its biggest one-time viewing audience,  
the Who chose repertory from Townshend’s increasingly ambitious  
late-1960s albums and afterward, when he was already taking a grown- 
up’s point of view: “Pinball Wizard” and the gentle “See me, feel me”  
snippet from his 1969 rock opera “Tommy”; “Baba O’Riley” and “Won’t  
Get Fooled Again” from the 1971 “Who’s Next”; and the title song from  
the 1978 “Who Are You.” If there was a 21st-century attention-span  
paradox in having the man who wrote rock operas and concept albums  
compress his life’s work into 12 minutes — well, Townshend said  
beforehand that the medley was Daltrey’s idea.

They were songs about prowess, determination, desperation and rage at  
how revolutions fail: an arc of verbal frustration defied, and  
explosively overcome, by musical assertiveness, with the power chords  
that the Who made ring worldwide. They were songs that expected, and  
got, large audiences at the time. It was music born to be heard in  
arenas and stadiums, and the halftime show might have been these  
songs’ last airing on their accustomed monumental scale.

The Who hasn’t toured lately and doesn’t plan to for the moment.  
Townshend said in an N.F.L. news conference that he has “health  
issues” with his shoulder and his hearing. But the band didn’t coast  
through its 12 minutes — even if the pulsating recorded keyboards of  
“Baba O’Riley” and “Won’t Get Fooled Again” gave them a few seconds of  
respite.

Townshend put full force into his famous windmilling guitar chords —  
echoed by the light display — and in “Who Are You” he hammered on the  
strings with a fist. Daltrey belted as if he wouldn’t mind being  
hoarse for the next week or two. Their backing musicians hit hard, as  
Townshend and Daltrey pumped their fists. And in “Won’t Get Fooled  
Again,” when Daltrey sang “the hypnotized never lie” to the television  
audience, he added, “Do ya?”

But Townshend can’t exactly “pick up my guitar and play, just like  
yesterday,” as “Won’t Get Fooled Again” vows. The songs are oldies  
now, so taken for granted that the Colts regularly use the Who for  
their entrance music at games. The turmoil the music captured,  
personal and societal, is all but buried by familiarity.

The Who did its best to punk up its songs again, even amid the Super  
Bowl’s fiesta of corporate branding, and “Won’t Get Fooled Again” —  
the song that got the fullest airing — still had a good part of its  
old ferocity. But it was a line in “Baba O’Riley” that touched on what  
kind of milestone this brief, happily unkempt, late-career performance  
was for the Who. “Let’s get together before we get much older,”  
Daltrey sang, looking directly across the stage at Townshend.