Fans wait through Joan Jett and the B52s for the main event.

band was clearly not among friends, and its truncated set was played entirely to the accompaniment of incoming missiles from an audience that had had it up to here.

Evening fell at 5:45, and The Who, the longest-lasting rock ’n’ roll band in the world, came out to play another stop in what is said to be its final American tour. The band is not dissolving, but all members have emphatically agreed that this is absolutely their last time on the road.

Another rock ’n’ roll ritual: So these are the last Who concerts you’ll ever see. There can’t be many of these rituals left. You run out of rituals, the well goes dry. In the end you reach for anything that means something, anything even close to the way you used to measure things, and you would dearly want the very last Who concert ever to sum up all the cumulatives and talk about your generation again.

Waiting for the show to start, Billy Tsacrios is wondering if he knows before it even starts that probably things really aren’t going to be like that.

Billy is a retired roadie from Tampa, and he used to drive around The Who’s Peter Townshend whenever Townshend took a Weeki Wachee holiday. Those were the days, he remembers wistfully, those were crazy times. He’s 31 now, old enough to marvel that Townshend, at 38, can still jump like a rabbit, old enough to have seen things turn around considerably.

Roger Daltrey, he is shaking his head, does a Bulova commercial now. “They used to be such a bunch of freaks,” he says.

Well, really, who were these guys. Just another rock ’n’ roll band. Better than most, to be sure, and reassuringly constant for the longest of times; for more years than is decent, they have been celebrated on grounds of durability alone, as if the mere act of making it 20 years past the post-Beat early 1960s was some sort of remarkable achievement.

And who else is left? The Beatles, they’re dead, gunned down, stilled. The Rolling Stones, they’re still out there, the world’s greatest rock ’n’ roll band. That leaves only The Who, there’s nobody else in the league.

So they were here, these middle-aging rock ’n’ roll landmarks; lead guitarist Townshend, who is legendarily rock’s most intelligent spokesman; lead singer Daltrey, prettiest boy in all rock ’n’ roll; bassist John Entwhistle, sleepy-eyed and stolidly unmoving; and drummer Kenny Jones, successor to the dead madman, Keith Moon.

For two thunderous and driven hours, they played the entire history of rock ’n’ roll, which they had helped to construct. They were there from the beginning — they stayed high voltage through the night.

It stayed high voltage through the night. There was no slowdown from this band that almost single-handedly invented what became known as heavy-metal power rock.

What to do with this?

“It goes to show again that the only truth is the word of God,” the cab driver is explaining earnestly to his passengers. “And the heart of man is desperately wicked.” The passengers nod understandingly, afraid to say anything.

“Summing forth demons is all they’re doing.” The cab driver looks up triumphantly. “I’ve been reading this book,” he says.