Rock's Outer Limits

By JAY COCKS

Time enough, in 15 years, for three new generations and a dozen new audiences. The Who has outpaced them all. Time enough for a bewilderment of pop styles to flare, settle, burn out. The Who has outlasted them all. Too much time for most rock bands to survive. The Who, in every sense of the word, has outlived them all, and outclassed them too.

The Who has sustained--indeed, defined--the vaunting, unstable strength that is the soul of rock, the barefoot boogie along the keen edge of the blade. There are lots of scars and some wounds that will never heal. The music remains intact, inviolate. No other group has ever pushed rock so far, or asked so much from it. No other band has ever matched its sound, a particular combination of sonic onslaught and melodic delicacy that is like chamber music in the middle of a commando raid. No other group, in return, has ever had so much asked of it by an audience which takes it as an absolute article of faith that, every time out, The Who plays for mortal stakes.

In performance the band seems to play possessed. The music itself is animated by excess, insists on, and receives, a response in kind. Who audiences are some of the most fiercely loyal, and some of the wildest, in rock. Abandon is the aim, and to reach that The Who acts in concert with the audience; "They bring you alive," as John Entwistle, the bass player, puts it. The excess they want, group and fans together, is a release, an explosive culmination of energy, a detonation of good will and great music. "Rock's always been demanding," says Pete Townshend, who writes most Who songs. "It is demanding of its performers, and its audience. And of society. Demanding of change."

Society sometimes does not get the message, and that only seems to push The Who harder. The power and unpredictability of the group, along with its longstanding and much vaunted intramural volatility ("We've been breaking up ever since the day we started," says Vocalist Roger Daltrey), are a large measure of its appeal and, ironically, the core of much of its strength. It is also the source for a good deal of discomfort and antagonism among those who take rock music casually, and especially among those who would like never to put up with it at all.

Last week, playing a concert date in Cincinnati during the first week of an 18-day blitz of the East and Midwest, The Who found itself performing after a crowd stampede that killed eleven people. The tragedy took place outside Riverfront Coliseum as thousands of kids holding unreserved seats charged across a concrete plaza toward two unlocked entrances. The group had not yet come onstage. "If it had happened inside," said Townshend, "I would never have played again." The musicians could not be blamed and, indeed, did not learn what had happened until after the concert. They were shattered, and, for a time, considered that in some way they might be responsible. The Who knows as well as its fans that, since the group's beginning, it has always lived at the outer limits of rock. That is the dangerous borderland where the best rock music is made, the music that lasts and makes a difference. Elvis Presley lived there. So still do Chuck Berry and John Lennon, Van Morrison and Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen. Buddy Holly, Sam Cooke and Jimi Hendrix died there. And The Who has taken up permanent residence. The danger that pervades this territory is not a matter of threat, but a kind of proud, blind, spiritual recklessness, forming a musical brotherhood that could be bound by the words of Russian Poet Andrei Voznesensky: "To live is to burn."

For a long time, back in their early days, the four received a great deal of notoriety for smashing their instruments at the end of each performance. It was, at first, a flashy, frightening and finally exhilarating thing to see. Drummer Keith Moon blew up his drum kit, and Townshend rammed the neck of his guitar into his amp, while Daltrey slammed his microphone against the stage and Entwistle held tight to his bass, playing stubbornly on like a shipwreck's lone survivor trying to keep dry in a leaking lifeboat. There was too much discussion about how all this was rock's reflection of Pop art, happenings and autodestruction, how the demolition was an action critique of material values. But until the destruction came to be expected and then required, all this razing was never phony. Anyone in the audience could tell those instruments were extensions of, even surrogates for, the four blessed, blitzed maniacs in the band. That was not Pop art onstage; it was a gang war.

There were no separate peaces. Only nightly shards of instruments lying on the floor of the stage like jigsaw fragments. "We're always trying to outdo each other onstage," Daltrey says. "All of us are a bit mad. We've stayed together for 15 years because we've never stopped fighting." Adds Townshend, "The Who's like an open book. It leads to a kind of unwitting honesty. That's what I think the fans really get fanatic about."

Whether witting or withdrawn, like savings, from some secret zinc-lined stockpile, the honesty of the performance and of the music was armor piercing. "The Who sound came from us playing as a three-piece band and trying to sound like more," Entwistle told TIME's Janice Castro. "I play standard bass, but I combine it with long runs where I take over the lead while Pete bashes out chords." Townshends guitar style--a sort of flywheel progression from rhythmic chords to melody and back again, all performed with whirling arms, splits, slides and high jumps--attracted as much attention as his songs. An early Townshend tune like My Generation, with a chorus od stuttered definace ("Why don't you all f-f-f-fade away") and its refrain like a middle-finger salute ("Hope I die before I get old") put everyone on notice. In the 14 years since that single came out, The Who has lost none of its power. Townshend may have refined the song musically, shaped the message a little more deftly, as in Won't Get Fooled Again, but the spirit remains the same and just as impossible to tame. That spirit turns Won't Get Fooled Again into rock's best and most furious political manifesto. Its sardonic observations on the bicameral process ("The parting on the left/ Is now the parting on the right") and the bitter truth of its conclusion ("Meet the new boss/ Same as the old boss") make it a fine anthem for any election year, anywhere.

The Beatles fell prey to divisiveness, disarray. The Rolling Stones traveled fast, turned gangrenous. The Who kept its distance, stayed strong by staying stubborn, contentious. Buoyed by the great breaking wave of British rock during the '60s, the group managed to swim clear. "We've sometimes been able to hide behind bands like the Beatles and the Stones, who got so much flak," Townshend says. "Yet we were significantly stronger than other contemporaries. Stronger in live performance, for example. And much more daring with material."

Not only does The Who's old material sound vital now, the new songs are as powerful as anything the punks or the new wave set down. There are other supergroups, like the Eagles or Fleetwood Mac, who turn out a kind of well-tooled pop that beats The Who in the charts. There are even other hard-rock groups, like Led Zeppelin, that lay down a kind of sugar-lined bombast that can razzle-dazzle the record buyer. The Who's cumulative sales exceed 20 million records. The members' individual wealth--Townshend, Entwistle and Daltrey are all millionaires several times over--is nothing to sulk about, even if the band is not in the highest OPEC aristocracy of rock. This is a matter of no particular moment to the group. It coasts past trends and floats over sales curves just by staying a little outside and to the left of the main current.

One of the few major alterations in The Who is that for years there has been no breaking of instruments. "Sometimes I got the feeling," says Entwistle, 35, "that the people wished we would just come out, smash up the lot and leave." An additional, sadder change occurred when Keith Moon died of drug overdose at 31; he was replaced on drums by Kenny Jones, 31. The group still puts My Generation across with enough swagger and insinuation to get you giddy or make you feel like you are being stalked down a dark street. When Townshend, 35, called himself "the aging daddy of punk rock," he was not being entirely facetious. Who music can match the tough street impact of punk, especially as Daltrey dishes it out. At 35, he may be one of the oldest kids in the playground, but he is still one of the toughest. Townshend melodies like Pure and Easy, Baba O'Riley and Music Must Change have the structural sophistication of music that is usually presumed to be more "serious." They also have a visceral challenge, a rush that only Springsteen, among Who contemporaries, can rival.

The rush is the path into the music. The way to the center and out again is a good deal more complex and subtle. Townshend's obsessions are the audience, music itself and a certain evasive, almost evanescent kind of spirituality that has its roots in the teaching of the Indian mystic Meher Baba, to whom Townshend is devoted. Tommy, which became the most widely known Who work, was a two-record "rock opera" about a deaf, dumb and blind pinball champ who was raised into a kind of pop artifact and rock-'n'-roll godhead. It sold more than 2 million copies, bought the band out of years of accumulated debt from broken instruments, leveled hotel rooms and erratic U.S. touring. It also brought the members of The Who a flash of stateside fame they had not previously known. Before Tommy they had been notorious; now they were celebrities. Also in 1969, The Who appeared at Woodstock. "It was all very lovely," Entwistle remembers. "People shacking up in tents sunk three feet in the mud, no toilets, peace and love. Backstage I had a couple of cups of fruit juice and found out someone had put acid in it. I wanted to kill him." Onstage The Who sliced through the flower power like a chain saw in a daisy garden, played with an intensity that took the show away from such Mallomar bands as the Jefferson Airplane. Abbie Hoffman scrambled up to join the proceedings, and Townshend responded, as he recalled later, by "kicking [his] little ass in a proud rage."

In the midst of all these pyrotechnics, it was easy enough to lose sight of the fact that The Who stood in defiance of the Woodstock generation. "You've got to remember that Tommy was antidrug in 1969," Daltrey recalls. Townshend, who had been through his own phase with drugs, was not only using Tommy as a mirror for Baba's antidrug strictures but was also putting refractions of Baba's teachings into a rock context. Tommy ended by pulling the rug out from under false idols, directing the search for salvation inward and out toward the audience. What Tommy sang to his disciples, freeing them, was also the Who's address to its audience, both thanks and a supplication: "Listening to you, I get the music/Gazing at you, I get the heat/Following you, I climb the mountain/I get excitement at your feet."

All of this, which seems clear in retrospect, got muddled up in the psychedelic Zeitgeist of the waning '60s, and then confounded even further by the buoyantly bonkers ministrations of Director Ken Russell, whose wildly successful 1975 film version of Tommy was like Busby Berkeley on a bummer. By that time, The Who was working on extensions both of Tommy's form and its themes. Quadrophenia (1973) was an even more ambitious, although less flashy, successor, a two-record chronicle of the desperate life and ironic resurrection of a poor London Mod kid in the early '60s. (It has just been released in a street-shrewd, roughhouse movie adaptation. The sound track, remixed by Entwistle, sounds even better than the recorded original.)

Another project, conceived after Tommy but so far unrealized, is a futuristic tale about the rediscovery of music in a society that is totally programmed and controlled. Called Lifehouse, the piece was intended to be a kind of environmental theater event. Some of Townshend's best songs were written originally for Lifehouse: Baba O'Riley, with its synthesizer line running like cold water down the spine, mixing with an old Irish fiddle reel and the memorable lyric refrain, "Don't cry/ Don't raise your eye/ It's only teen-age wasteland"; the aching, almost elegant poignancy of The Song Is Over and Pure and Easy. All these songs concerned music and the compact of trust between audience and artist. As compositions they enhanced and extended the possibilities of rock. As Townshend wrote those songs, and The Who performed them, the truth of Townshend's contention became clear: "Rock has no limits." All that, and they can be danced to, too.

As individualistic as those Townshend compositions are, they remain a group statement. Townshend, who has no use for modesty, insists, "I can still use The Who more effectively to speak to people heart to heart than I ever could on a solo album." Daltrey observes, "Did you ever notice that nobody ever does Townshend's songs? The Who are the only people who can play them. That's one reason we've survived. None of us is very good on his own. It's only as part of The Who that we're great."

The four parts remain in uneasy alliance. When Drummer Keith Moon was alive, he was like a self-contained chain reaction, "our little bit of nasty," as Daltrey calls him. Moon died of an overdose of Heminevirin, a drug he was taking to combat his alcoholism. Moon's passing forced a crisis within the group, the three surviving members re-examining their loyalty to rock, and to each other. Daltrey told Townshend: "Keith's life and death were a gift to the group. A sacrifice to allow us to continue." Townshend recalls thinking at the time, "How can I agree with something as 20th Century-Fox as that? But I felt it too. That besides being a sacrifice, Keith's death had given me a stronghold." The Who asked Kenny Jones to replace Moon, and set about trying to re-create the delicate imbalance of the group. Jones, as affable and easygoing as Moon was looney, plays with all his predecessor's fine fury, matching or surpassing him in musicianship, while wisely avoiding any attempt to duplicate Moon's madcap charades.

If, as Daltrey says, The Who is like a family, then Kenny Jones is still perhaps the orphaned cousin from overseas who has come to start a new life. "The others were a bit arrogant at the outset," Jones reports. "We'd start playing one of their songs, and they'd be shocked I didn't know it. But why should I know Who songs? I had my own band." After a decade and a half spent playing and warring together, the three senior Who members may be like brothers, but with undercurrents of the Karamazovs and an overlay of the Dalton boys. It is not only a matter of maintaining a punishingly high musical standard; The Who has the weight of its own myth and the burden of its own history to support.

Daltrey got the band together. At 15, he left school in London, took a job as a sheet-metal worker that he held for five years. He also made his own guitars and formed a group called the Detours. On the street one day, he spotted "this great big geezer with a homemade bass that looked like a football boot with a neck sticking out of it," and recruited Entwistle on the spot. Soon after that, Daltrey decked the Detour's lead singer and took over the vocals himself. Now the Detours needed a rhythm guitar player. Entwistle mentioned his school chum, Townshend, whom Daltrey recalls as "looking like a nose on a stick."

"The greatest bloody triumph of my schooldays was when Roger asked me if I could play guitar," Townshend recalls. "If he had ever said, 'Come out in the playground and I'll fight you,' I would have been down in one punch. Music was the only way I could ever win. But I've despised him ever since."

All were from a working-class background in London. Daltrey's father was a clerk, Entwistle's a mechanic. But both Townshend's parents were dance-band musicians. "My dad's a great player," Townshend says. "Not a cowboy, but a great player. My mom was a singer. She was a bit of a cowboy." The band found its own cowboy, or show boater, one night when a half-drunk rowdy took the stage, displaced the drummer and gave an uninvited audition that ended when he kicked over the drum kit. Keith Moon was a member of the band on the next date.

A publicist named Peter Meaden assumed informal responsibility for managing them, molding them into front men for the flourishing Mod movement. Representing a sort of secret style, a surly, dubious attitude and a way of life in which the work week was a lingering funeral and the weekend a temporary resurrection, Mod was a kind of berserk street refraction of traditional English clubmanship. Having the right clothes and shoes was important. Riding the right motor scooter was important. Gobbling the right pills in the right quantities and listening to the right music were important. All this has been captured well in Quadrophenia; there is a kind of masquerade Mod revival in England right now. Townshend, however, points out that the original Mod movement "was about fashion, but that doesn't mean it was superficial. Fashion, in a sense, is description of events after the fact. And the Mods had great taste in music."

Meaden wrote two Mod anthems, Zoot Suit and I'm the Face, for the group's first single, which was no particular success. Shortly after, the band switched managers, changed its name to The Who, and Townshend started writing his own tunes, widening the focus past Mod to take in all the audience. I Can't Explain, My Generation, The Kids Are Alright were as fresh and nervy as battle reports from the front lines where youth was locked in a tag-team match with the forces of the Establishment.

The Who came on strong in Britain, but in America was outpaced by the Beatles, who were beloved by all, and the Rolling Stones, who were even then playing devil's advocate in the Beatles' bright shadow. The Who made its first American appearance in 1965. Two years later, back again, the group was supporting Herman's Hermits on tour, giving those coy little gnomes nightly musical lumps and attracting a loyal band of American supporters.

That was the period when Townshend started to push. "I thought we had to do something grand, almost daft ... and possibly pompous." That was Tommy, and The Who finally had what it was after: a general audience success to match its reputation among rock fans.

Some things, however, remained unchanged. The Who continued to battle among themselves, drawing sustenance from friction that often flared into spot fires, blazing quickly and suddenly like canyon conflagrations in Los Angeles. Everyone had quit the group at one time or another. In 1965, Daltrey left, vowing to form another group, and came back a week later. "I thought if I lost the band I was dead," he says now. "I realized The Who was the thing, the reason I was successful. I didn't fight any more ... for a couple of years." Townshend, however, was not trying as strenuously to keep to the path of nonviolence, and, after one disagreement in the recording studio, brained Daltrey with his guitar. Daltrey responded by punching Pete into the hospital.

"A quick punch is always better than stewing about for months," Daltrey says, but by 1967, Moon and Entwistle were both fed up, and took a walk together. "I was always breaking up fights," Entwistle remembers, "pulling Roger off somebody, usually Pete. Keith and I were fed up with all the punching, and with Townshend's being so bigheaded, thinking he was a bleeding musical genius." Moon and Entwistle had eyes for a new group, and had even come up with a name and a rough design for an album cover. It was abandoned when Moon and Entwistle returned to The Who soon after the quarrel, but the idea was not entirely forgotten. The name of their projected group, along with similar artwork, appeared on an album by a new band called Led Zeppelin.

Daltrey played the first Tommy tour with a nose that had been broken "playfully" by Pete; Moon continued his spiritual dedication to rock-'n'-roll excess, working almost as much havoc on his own body as on the rooms he inhabited during tours. A hotel manager once appeared in Moon's room when he was playing a cassette at top volume and insisted he turn down "the noise." In a flash, Moon reduced the room to splinters, announcing, "This is noise. That was The Who."

Moon, who could also be wonderfully benign and sweet-tempered, a sort of rock-'n'-roll Shakespearean fool, commanded perhaps the greatest affection from the audience. He was also dosing himself for disaster, and he began to undermine the group. During an American tour in 1975, he failed to show up for a sold-out concert in Boston and, Daltrey says, "Pete never forgave him." Townshend and Daltrey had wrangled bitterly over Quadrophenia, and during the first half of the '70s each member of the band had spent as much time on his own solo projects as he had on band activities. Each put out at least one solo album. By 1976 the band had effectively stopped touring, and there were rumors that it had collapsed.

Torn like a page of parchment, Townshend brooded about all of this, decided that he was finally going to say, "Right, that's it: The Who becomes a business." He expected the others to turn him down. Instead, sensing that he was in a state of crisis, they supported him. The strongest backing, to Townshend's considerable surprise, came from Daltrey. "He said to me, 'I don't care whether we tour or make records or don't make records. I just always want to be able to work with you, always be able to sing your songs and, above everything else, I want you to be happy.' This was Roger Daltrey, right; the person I was seeing as a competitor. It was a revelation. Nobody has ever talked like that to me. Nobody. Not my mother, not my father, not my kids, not my wife. Nobody ever said things like that and meant them."

The Who came back together, started working on Who Are You. Moon returned from self-imposed exile in Los Angeles, tried to pull himself together. Some days he would play with his old brilliance. Other days he couldn't play at all. "We knew what was coming," Daltrey says, "but we were really shocked when it happened." Moon went out one night to a party, enjoyed himself in moderation, came back, swallowed an estimated 30 Heminevirins, and died. "The worst thing is that none of us were there when he died," says Entwistle. "We must have saved his life 30 times in the past, picking him up when he was unconscious and walking him around, getting him to a doctor."

"I don't think the group would be here if Keith hadn't died," Townshend says, and the others agree. "We certainly wouldn't be doing the kind of things we're doing now." He means not only making plans, which include for the next year a new Who album, Townshend and Entwistle solo efforts, two more mini-tours of the States, a handful of further film projects, including a Daltrey star role as an English con called Me Vicar, and the elusive Lifehouse. He also means making the kind of music that sets the standard and makes The Who the band to beat.

This should not be taken as any certain indication that the collective group temperature has lowered away from the torrid zone. The Who has no formal leader. Entwistle insists it has no leader at all. But Daltrey says he and Townshend are the leaders, with Entwistle having a strong say. If the lines of authority remain unclear, perhaps deliberately, personal lives are kept away from business as much as possible.

Daltrey lives a safe two-hour drive from the others, in a 17th century mansion surrounded by 300 acres of lush farm land in Sussex. He has an American wife, Heather, two daughters, Willow and Rosie, and a son by a previous marriage. He exercises to keep in trim, but had to give up working with weights because his broadening shoulders only exaggerated his stature or, at 5 ft. 7 in., his lack of it. There is nothing much he can do about his hearing. Like Townshend's, it has been impaired by long exposure to maximum amplification. "When it's noisy," he says, "I have to lip-read."

Townshend lives with his wife Karen and their two daughters Aminta and Emma in a house in suburban London or, as mood and convenience dictate, in another, larger establishment in Oxfordshire. Townshend tried not having a studio at home so he could spend more time with the family, but he finally succumbed and installed some recording equipment. When he was laying down a rough vocal track, his daughter, not at all certain of her father's occupation, burst through the door wanting to call a doctor because Daddy sounded in pain.

Entwistle and his wife Alison have been married for twelve years, have one son, Christopher Alexander John, and spend most of their time in a house on the edge of London. They also own an establishment in Gloucestershire consisting of eight houses spread over 52 acres. Entwistle's songs, which are like nightshade valentines, show up on Who albums often as a kind of bleakly bemused counterpoint to Townshend's. He is also a skilled caricaturist and is now drawing A Cartoon History of The Who. In this work, Entwistle made up imaginary ancestors for each of the band members based on some of their salient characteristics. There is, for example, a certain Wild Bill Daltrey, a tightwad gunslinger who drills his victims with platinum bullets, then digs them out of the victim for reuse. Townshend's forebear is a Norman soldier who landed at Hastings in 1066, fell out of the boat onto his shield and invented surfing, acquiring in the process a hugely swollen nose. Entwistle's own predecessor is a soused sea dog named Ahab, who goes about in a state of perpetual inebriation, spotting pink whales to port.

Kenny Jones has been christened "The Hairdresser" by the rest of the group for his high standard of grooming. Indeed in this mob he looks like a hopeful young actor fallen among thieves. Jones has a house on the outskirts of London, which he shares with his wife Janet and their two sons Dylan and Jesse. Jones enjoys the pleasures of a squire, himself, including riding to hounds, which he persists in calling "riding to dogs."

Life on the road tends to be livelier than home on the range. "I'm never fully alive unless I'm on the road," Entwistle says. "Groupies are part of that. They build up my ego, make me feel that I'm a star." Alison Entwistle has a different attitude: "I hate being at home when he is on the road. I know groupies are part of it, and I hate them all." Heather Daltrey says she doesn't bother about such things.

But Townshend, who wrote an ironic song about tour life called Romance on the Road, not yet released, is in typical fashion drawn in both directions about it. He can see through the romance like a pool, even as he dives into it. "He's perfectly capable of getting off the plane in New York and staying drunk for the entire tour," says one of his friends. A talk with Townshend at the best of times is a hopscotch game in a minefield. This is part of what he means when he says, with some melodrama and a strong measure of truth, "Rock is going to kill me somehow. Mentally or physically or something, it's going to get me in the end. It gets everybody in the end."

Any rock fan can recite the litany of tragic burnouts; whether Pete succumbs remains a matter of strength and a certain kind of sure footed brinkmanship that until now has kept Townshend writing and The Who performing true lifeline rock 'n' roll. The members of The Who know what this music means, know its power and its necessary mutability. They also know what it means to the kids, not just a quick charge and an antic rush in a minute of concert footage but a change as potentially profound as any art can work, and even more immediate. All of this is in the four lines of Music Must Change that Townshend sings quietly, almost to himself:

Is this song so different? Am I doing it all again ? It may have been done before But then music's an open door . . .

Others tried to open that door, unlock it, or force it, or jimmy it, or slide under it in the night. The Who kicked it open. And The Who was on the other side.--JayCocks

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