Roger Daltrey and Pete Townshend of The Who perform Monday at Bridgestone Arena. The band first performed in Nashville in the summer of 1968.

Before he could strum his guitar Monday night at Bridgestone Arena, The Who's Pete Townshend had to deal with a different instrument.

"What's my (expletive) password?" he muttered, pawing at an iPad attached to his microphone stand. "Oh! I've got an email. Hold on a minute."

The crowd of die-hard fans chuckled at the joke, but it could have been seen as a bad omen for the concert. A recent interview with Rolling Stone suggested that Townshend's heart wasn't fully in the British rock group's latest — and potentially last — large-scale concert tour. If that's true, it doesn't seem to slow them down.

Townshend and frontman Roger Daltrey came out swinging (literally, with windmill guitar strums and microphone cable twirls) on their first big hit, "I Can't Explain." From there, they whipped around the band's many incarnations through the '60s, '70s and '80s.

The Who first performed in Nashville in the summer of 1968. Forty-seven years later, the town's musical culture was still on their minds.

"I came to Nashville a bit early," Townshend told the crowd. "I bought a mandolin, and I took it to my hotel room. I started to play it, and I could hear the city kind of chiming in. It was kind of creepy."

Toward the end of the night, Daltrey had their Nashville audience singing the refrain of "Baba O'Riley," giving him a break from those rafter-reaching notes. But the 71-year-old singer was in admirable form and spirits throughout the night. Though he was dwarfed by a massive video wall and your usual arena rock light display, his signature scream on "Won't Get Fooled Again" was easily the night's most electric moment.