Thurs., May 1, 1980
The Who — A rock ’n’ roll miracle in Ames
Register Staff Writer
AMES, IA. — The Who shot up Iowa with a vein full of rock ’n’ roll — the hard stuff — at Hilton Coliseum Tuesday.
An estimated 14,000 enthusiastic fans reveled in it and stayed on their feet for the entire 110-minute show.
The crack British rock quartet delivered some monstrous full bore rock and made a few mistakes. There were several miscues, mostly
MUSIC REVIEW
involving losing the beat for a moment now and then. And the sound system, nicely hung overhead to avoid blocking the view, whistled jarring feedback on and off for much of the night.
Nobody cared. It was the good stuff they had come for, and it was there in spades.
Powerhouse Rock
No band can really rock out as The Who can. Some fans would argue, in fact, that this group invented powerhouse rock ’n’ roll back in 1965. It certainly played as if it had.
Singer Roger Daltrey’s voice rent the hall and charged its atmosphere. Guitarist Pete Townshend’s licks, runs and windmill power chords found the primal rock consciousness in the many fans and drew them together in a joyous expression of raw feeling.
Bassist John Entwhistle poured the rock solid foundation it all needed, as well as pulling off several stunning bass leads. Drummer Kenny Jones, replacing the late Keith Moon, smashed along behind and beneath it all providing — for the most part — an adequate steadiness, though without any of Moon’s flash.
A trio of brass wind players and a keyboardist — none of them identified by name — rounded out the group.
There was a particular irony here. Daltrey and Townshend, the band’s “front” men, looked as if they could have rolled in from anywhere to play with a show at some back street bar. Each had short hair and wore a jacket and blue jeans, giving them the look of today’s New Wave rockers.
Long Ago
The irony is, that’s how they looked 15 years ago when they kicked off the musical style that nowadays is considered fresh and modern.
The Who did one of its more piercing numbers early in the set, a piece lately rediscovered by some Iowa radio stations: “Baba O’Reilly.” Daltrey chilled the crowd when he declared: “Out here in the fields, I’ve found something real. I get my back into my living.” Townshend stepped to the microphone and instructed listeners: “Don’t cry, don’t close your eyes. It’s only teen-age wasteland.” The sentiment hit its mark; the exhuberant crowd roared acknowledgement with one voice.
Townshend’s singing sounded strained for a moment, but he quickly recovered and it never happened again.
Entwhistle’s bass was nearly perfect — solid without any muddiness or roar — as he underpinned “Behind Blue Eyes.” It is another of Townshend’s many pithy, insightful and crisp comments on society. Daltrey sang: “No one knows what it’s like to be the bad man, the sad man, behind blue eyes. . . . My dreams, they aren’t as empty as my conscience seems to be.”
The piece simply cooked.
Brass Punch
The horns figured nicely into “Who Are You,” a seemingly appropriate question for an aging rock star to be asking. As Entwhistle, Townshend and the keyboardist layered their harmonies — “Who are you? Who, who? Who, who?” — over Daltrey’s lead vocals, the brass punched its own voicing of that same phrase, filling the arena with the question.
To bring it home more firmly, Daltrey — looking tanned and much more like a beach bum than a rock star — ran in place as if he were pursued or pursuing. The feeling of relentlessness fairly dripped from both the tune and its central query.
Band and audience communed during Townshend’s paean to stimulation of an artist by an audience. A tooth-jarring instrumental led into the vocal verse on which Entwhistle and Townshend sang with Daltrey: “From you I get the glory; from you I get opinions; from you I get the story . . . I get excitement at your feet.”
A person in the crowd hoisted a crutch, and it was easy to imagine, gazing at thousands of enraptured faces unclouded by the world, that a miracle had taken place.
It was a peaceful miracle; there were no unusual incidents.
S. Africa police teargas students
JOHANNESBURG, SOUTH AFRICA (AP) — Police said they fired tear gas into a crowd of black students Wednesday after the students, protesting unequal education, threw rocks at police near the coastal city of Durban, injuring two officers slightly.
The black protest followed demonstrations by Asian students the past two weeks against unequal education expenditures for whites and nonwhites in South Africa. No serious injuries have been reported in any of the demonstrations.
The white-minority government in South Africa spends $73 a year to educate each black pupil, $240 on each colored pupil and more than $800 on each white pupil.
