The Virtuosos Are Alright
The great thing about The Who is that everybody in that band was playing lead. Pete on lead guitar, Roger on lead vocals, John Entwistle on lead bass, Keith Moon on lead drums. (If you’re not a musician you may not get that joke, but that’s okay; you can read through the blog archives and find plenty of non-musical jokes to enjoy.) With that much virtuosity going on, it’s a wonder they even kept time. But they did. Here’s “Won’t Get Fooled Again” from The Kids Are Alright, filmed in 1978:
Can you beat that? No, you cannot.
I love The Who now, I loved The Who then. Hence my ambivalence about punk rock when it came along. It’s commonplace nowadays to recognize The Who as the spiritual progenitors of punk, but in the late 70s they were rock royalty, and thus part of the ancien regime that punk was rebelling against. Now I grant you, as an antidote to slick corporate 70s crapola, punk was entirely necessary. There was a tremendous amount of very bad music in the 70s, and punk was like a hand grenade in a shopping mall. Clear the fucking decks, people. Take your hairspray and your Peter Frampton records and get the fuck out.
Unfortunately, punk rock also embraced an aggressive disregard for actual musicianship. Music by people who couldn’t actually play their instruments: this was 90% of punk rock. Johnny Rotten wore an “I hate Pink Floyd” t-shirt, but you know, the guys in Pink Floyd could actually find their way around their instruments. Rotten’s bandmate Sid Vicious, on the other hand, was so inept they had to unplug his bass during gigs. I always regarded punk as more of a sociopolitical movement than a musical revolution, and I remember being irritated by people who insisted that punks were playing great music. No, they weren’t. They were playing something — rage, frustration, resentment, irony, wit — but musical geniuses they were not.
Even my favorite American sort-of-punk/New Wave band, Talking Heads, were musically thin. I mean really thin. Their sound is what you get when art school students decide to learn guitar and bass over the weekend and then put together a band. And I say that as someone who loves the Heads and listens to their old stuff regularly.
But I’m getting ahead of myself! This stop on the YouTube tour is supposed to be about The Who!
I want it I want it I want it I want it I want it YOU CAN’T HAVE IT!!!!
30 Responses to “The Virtuosos Are Alright”
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gxm17 says:
I loved punk rock when it first showed up in the 70s and it didn’t stop my love of the Who. Even today, I have a photo of Keith Moon’s blue platform shoes on my office door.
And I suggest you check out Richard Hell’s VoidOids, a band that featured the not very well known, but much acclaimed, guitarist Robert Quine. Many of the New York punk bands, like most NYC musicians, were quite proficient.
April 12th, 2009 at 10:26 pm EST -
Violet says:
Oh, there were definitely some talented people in punk. I tend to think that the people who rose to the top or endured the longest were the 10% with real ability one way or another (lyrically, musically).
Isn’t Quine on Rolling Stone’s list of 100 best guitarists? He played with Lou Reed too.
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gxm17 says:
Yes. I believe he’s around number 80. Most folks have never heard of him but he does get recognition in the music world.
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Nina M. says:
Violet, is there no topic in which you’re not conversant? Your brain must be enormous!
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ea says:
Queen. Queen. Queen. Queen. Queen.
Okay, I liked Queen with Freddie Mercury.
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anne says:
I’m transfixed by Roger Daltrey’s exceedingly tight trousers. They don’t make ‘em like that anymore.
It’s a good song. They obviously liked it too, given how long they went on playing it in this clip.
It’s a shame they couldn’t airbrush out Townshend the child porn user though.
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Violet says:
Pete Townshend is not a child porn user. That’s a really ugly accusation and I’m tired of seeing it repeated.
Airbrush out the man who wrote the song? The creative genius of The Who? Good lord.
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Sis says:
Yes. Tight pants and cheekbones. That’s what rock’s all about.
Who are you listening to NOW?
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Sis says:
Possibly, you have every album, and saw every concert. But here’s an online archive of both singles and concerts. No video, just audio.
http://www.archive.org/search......on%3Aetree
This is a good site to search for any band, or movie.
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Sis says:
Oh forget that last link. It bounces to some idiot page no matter what I do.
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tinfoil hattie says:
I love The Who. I have just been listening to my new cheapie downloads of Who songs for the last 3 days. Great minds, eh? (or maybe “old” minds?)
I also love, love, LOVE Robert Plant with all my heart. The PIPES on that dude. His album with Allison Krauss is amazing. His voice has really held up.
I also love Heart, Phoebe Snow, Bonnie Raitt, Emmylou Harris – I’m a big fan of good vocals.
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polly styrene says:
Am I the only person who hasn’t forgotten Pete Townshend was done for downloading child porn? Cos he was you know. Not in itself a reason to hate the Who’s entire output (I’m still going to be listening to Phil Spector’s stuff), but still.
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purplefinn says:
I am experiencing very slow downloading for this site. I have upgraded Firefox recently. It doesn’t seem to affect other sites.
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Martha says:
Violet, can you please blog on Samson Obama’s November arrest in England for sexually assaulting a 13-year-old girl. He gave a fake name. While attempting to attend half-brother Barack’s inauguration, he attempted to go into the UK and that’s when they found out he’d given a fake name and he was barred from returning.
Sexual assault is not a minor issue and it’s Barack’s half-brother.
Women on the Web wrote about it here:
http://www.wowowow.com/politic.....isa-266310 -
m Andrea says:
I tend to think that the people who rose to the top or endured the longest were the 10% with real ability one way or another.
True for anything. Now quit goofing off and get back to work, MissSmartyPants. (‘Course, even Einstein attributed that mostly to perseverance — or was it Edison?) Anyway, some of us would like to read a real blog post, yanno. Meh, suppose I could scroll the archives…
How come you don’t feel like blogging? Time for a break? You could do a few posts in advance, and let it go at that. Or none at all! I was unplugged for three weeks, and it was amazing. Utter solitude has a way of grounding me like nothing else — it’s so easy to be distracted by my to-do list and forget what’s really enjoyable about life, or what’s truly worth bothering about.
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m Andrea says:
Holy crap, Martha! Now why on earth didn’t the big news outlets bother reporting that? Utterly frickin fascinating, considering they found it of vital public interest that we know in great lurid detail about Palin’s relatives.
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Anna Belle says:
Unfortunately, punk rock also embraced an aggressive disregard for actual musicianship. Music by people who couldn’t actually play their instruments: this was 90% of punk rock. Johnny Rotten wore an “I hate Pink Floyd” t-shirt, but you know, the guys in Pink Floyd could actually find their way around their instruments. Rotten’s bandmate Sid Vicious, on the other hand, was so inept they had to unplug his bass during gigs. I always regarded punk as more of a sociopolitical movement than a musical revolution, and I remember being irritated by people who insisted that punks were playing great music. No, they weren’t. They were playing something — rage, frustration, resentment, irony, wit — but musical geniuses they were not.
Well said! The same trends have been making their way into the world of poetry and fiction for a decade now, at least. I’m reading this chapbook by this “experimental class-conscious” poet, and near as I can tell, he just discusses pictures he took but didn’t include, and it’s a lot of italicized historical stuff interspersed with boring observational sentences, bolded I assume to demonstrate that’s the poet’s voice. I had to shell out $15 for this claptrap that I am SURE my professor will attempt to elevate to art later today, with all the attendant presumptions about truth and beauty. It is so fucking not art and the author is not a poet. He’s a child whining about his extended childhood,ffs.
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Lori says:
Polly,
Do you not know how the charges against Pete were resolved?
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Lori says:
I’ve always loved The Who. Two concerts in the past several years have made an incendiary impression on me. The Concert For New York, after 9/11, where they turned Baba O’Riley into a revelation. It had a moral authority that I have never seen them infuse that song with before. And then watching the firefighters and the police singing along to Won’t Get Fooled Again. Off in the distance, was a shot of a camera man, with a 25 pound camera on his shoulder singing along as well. Recently I saw, The Who’s concert at Royal Albert Hall with Zach Starkey on drums. I was humbled. I don’t know how else to describe how it made me feel.
Lastly, The Rolling Stone’s Rock n Roll circus where The Who decide they need to kick everyone’s ass and maybe they do. They do A Quick One and it is fabulous. I get the “You Are Forgiven” refrain stuck in my head all the time.
I truly love this band.
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Sis says:
Totally lost on me. I don’t thinks that’s generational, because I follow music avidly, right through the generations. I do not play an instrument myself but I have professional and journeymem musicians in my family, and music was *music* is big in my life. I don’t get stuck in the music of my generation: I’m always looking for the next great thing.
I’m watching this guy now. I think he’s going to be big. He’s Dene.
http://www.myspace.com/jaygilday -
Violet says:
Am I the only person who hasn’t forgotten Pete Townshend was done for downloading child porn? Cos he was you know.
Okay, I’m going to say this once:
Pete Townshend is not a child porn user. He was himself abused as a child (see Tommy). In the late 90s and early 2000s he became involved in activism against the growing child porn internet industry, and he published a paper on it which he was planning to expand into a book. (For those who don’t know, Townshend is not only a rock genius but a long time literatus who has published books and essays regularly since the late 60s). At some point in 1999, while working on the paper, he apparently used his credit card to access one of the sites he was writing about. If you read the paper, he actually documents that — how easy it is for people to get access to the porn. Years later Scotland Yard instituted a sweep of all credit cards that appeared in the records of any porn or porn-related sites for the previous 5 years or so — a completely techno-incompetent investigation that was later slammed for its computer illiteracy and the legions of false accusations it led to. Pete’s credit card appeared once, in 1999. Not for downloading anything, but just a single entry with his card (which matches what he’d written about in his paper).
The idiot police did a four-month investigation, searched all Townshend’s computers, looked into the background, and cleared him of charges. No, he was not a child porn user, didn’t possess any child porn, etc., and was innocent. But in the meantime the rumor mongers had a field day.
Pete Townshend is not a child porn user and I don’t want to hear any more bullshit about it.
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Violet says:
The Concert For New York, after 9/11, where they turned Baba O’Riley into a revelation. It had a moral authority that I have never seen them infuse that song with before.
Their entire set at the Concert for New York was a revelation. They were miles ahead of anybody else. One of their best live performances ever, and the sheer power of their music (and the sheer quality of their musicianship) was stunning.
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Violet says:
mAndrea, your comment #15 is surpassingly strange. “Why don’t you feel like blogging?” you ask, on a blog post. An actual post on a blog, written by me.
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Violet says:
I’m not sure what part of “I don’t want to hear any more bullshit about it” you folks didn’t understand, but here it is again:
Pete Townshend is not a child porn user and I don’t want to hear any more bullshit about it.
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yttik says:
“Meet the new boss, same as the old boss”
The more things change the more they stay the same.
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Lori says:
So, Violet, have you seen the Royal Albert Hall concert? If not, get thee to Net Flix. It is amazingly, wonderfully, staggering wonderful. I love Keith Moon, but Zach Starkey is the drummer they have always needed.
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Shane says:
The special edition of [i]The Kids Are Alright[/i] (which is a must for any Who fan) has a feature where you can watch that Won’t Get Fooled Again performance for multiple angles and isolate what John Entwistle’s playing, which you can also find online at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DL4fVqlKWUw
Its pretty mindblowing. -
m Andrea says:
Because you are off topic, that’s why. First you were ogling Yul Brenner, now you’re whining about punk rock, next you’ll have a slew of alpaca pictures, probably followed by sewing patterns of 5th century shepherdesses who beat taiko drums on their day off.
One can only surmise you don’t feel like blogging on topic, which would be hosting discussions of a feministy nature. And then I mentioned the benefits of taking a break to you and not to Echidne, who is kinda doing the same thing in slow-mo but who most likely wouldn’t return.
I cannot lose both my favorite people at the same time to adoxography. It would be a trauma, and I would need therapy. *sniff* Incidently, SHE keeps whining about the need to connect with her readers over non-feministy affiche, but that whole “fweeling” business might as well be french to me. Anyway, you’re awesome — now get back to work. Or not. lol
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Violet says:
One can only surmise you don’t feel like blogging on topic, which would be hosting discussions of a feministy nature.
It’s one thing to frequent a blog; it’s another to start hallucinating that you actually own the fucking thing. mAndrea, this is my blog, not yours. The stated topics are “feminism, politics, and random pedantry,” that last term being sufficient to encompass anything I want to talk about.
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m Andrea says:
Ok, my last comment obviously didn’t come out as jokey as intended. Clearly, I am suckalicious and offer profuse and humble apologies. You are fabulous and of course it’s your blog!
