ORLANDO – “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.

Indeed, things were starting to get seriously surly for a while inside the Tangerine Bowl, and tending unpleasantness darkened the field as surely as the long shadows of late afternoon; finally, the B52s just gave up and left the stage, given the hook after a scant 20 minutes, and cans and Dixie cups and jeers rained after them. The Who were still more than an hour away.

“Please move back, please move back,” the security man on stage kept urging. “We don’t want anybody hurt here.” Pointedly blood-quieting softrock began from the PA, and the crush of bodies up front shifted sufficiently to let the guards lift a few more inert forms over the rail.

Eventually, a calm of sorts prevailed, and the security jitters eased; for an instant, it had seemed as if the good name of Orlando might be blighted by the historical imperative of a rock ’n’ roll trample, the sort of thing that occurs at Who concerts and papal visits.

But it was cool now that the B52s were gone. This band, in fact, plays pretty irritating music.

“Oowww,” Jerry Dilsaver said, his practiced rock promoter’s eye seeing a bad talent package. In fairness to the B52s, he offered, it probably was not the case that the band had been so terrible. “The crowd is here to see The Who. Basically, they’re just putting up with the opening acts.”

For sure. Joan Jett and the Blackhearts, had opened the show at 3 p.m. Saturday, a certified killer group that had to be surprised at how little excitement it generated. The crowd let Jett leave without calling her back for more, which happens not a lot to acts of her stature.

Putting up with Joan Jett was one thing; this was definable rock ’n’ roll — devoid, perhaps, of anything much more than crude insect intelligence, but full of sneers and struts and a dangerousness appropriate to the day.

The B52s, on the other hand, were over their heads the minute they came out. Purveyors of a particularly inaccessible brand of tuneless tub-thumping New Wave, the 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 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.

Saturday, about 64,000 people had come to tell them goodby.

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 were 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 Antwhistle, 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.

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