ROGER DALTREY … strutting, stallionlike.

POP MUSIC REVIEW

The Who in Anaheim

By Robert Hilburn

Times Pop Music Critic

For those who had never seen the Who live, it must have been a precious moment Sunday when Keith Moon raced on stage with the band shortly before 6 p.m. at Anaheim Stadium and did a somersault in front of his drums. It helped bring some life to a show that had been a long time in reaching its peak.

Many in the mostly young, capacity crowd of 55,000 had been waiting eight hours or more—through three supporting acts, a series of aerial/acrobatic stunts and warm March day—for the Who to arrive.

Because Rufus had another concert Sunday night in Atlanta and needed to catch an early flight, the soul-based group opened the show at 1:15 rather than the scheduled Steve Gibbons Band. Led by Chaka Khan, a singer with exceptional range and strikingly adventurous vocal instincts, Rufus played a tight, varied set but fell victim to the same kind of semi-indifferent response, that audiences usually offer opening acts in such large outdoor situations.

Gibbons Band, Then Little Feat

Though it, too, played with punch and aggressiveness, the English, blues-based Gibbons Band fared little better with the audience in its local debut. Little Feat, which came next, drew more response with its brand of Southern-fried rock.

But the between-act stunts—first, Art Scholl’s aerial dips and dives and Jumpin’ Joe Gerlach’s 11-story leap into a bed-sized sponge—were one-two on the applause meter (until the Who arrived) on a day when the heat made the audience seem particularly concerned with conserving its energy. At one point the stadium message board read: “A Friendly Reminder: Sun Burns Your Skin.”

By the time Moon and the Who came on stage, the sun —mercifully—had gone down. But the audience, finally, was coming up. When measured against the audience’s passive manner earlier in the day, the roar of enthusiasm and celebration that greeted the Who, in fact, was reminiscent of people who leap out of closets or adjoining rooms at a surprise birthday party.

There was, of course, reason for the enthusiasm. The Who is one of the three or four groups to whom the term “world’s greatest rock ’n’ roll band” has been applied with any degree of validity or consensus.

Please Turn to Page 11, Col. 1

HAVING A BALL—The heat was on at Anaheim Stadium Sunday, but most of the capacity crowd of 55,000 who went to see the Who hung in there for the six-hour-plus show.

Times photos by Penni Gladstone